NPR’s Ari Shapiro speaks with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., about his office’s investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s financial transactions — and why he is urging the U.S. attorney general to act further.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Even six years after his death, there are many threads to follow in the story of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The Justice Department interviewed his former girlfriend and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in prison for a second day today, and President Trump tried again to change the subject.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They talk about me. I have nothing to do with the guy.
SHAPIRO: Another thread is the money trail. Three years ago, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon used his power as chair of the Senate Finance Committee to begin an investigation into Epstein’s finances. He’s now the ranking Democrat on that committee controlled by Republicans, and Wyden says his investigation has found suspicious transactions totaling more than $1 billion. He’s raised questions about the money trail that he wants the Justice Department to pursue. He sent a letter to the Attorney General laying out the case, and he is here to tell us what his staff found. Senator Wyden, welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
RON WYDEN: Thanks for having me, Ari.
SHAPIRO: Your investigation found that unusually large amounts of money were being moved around. Can you just big-picture describe what these suspicious transactions looked like?
WYDEN: Well, we found, for example, 4,700 wire transfers, and there were details about women and girls being trafficked. And we’ve seen evidence of a paper trail, account records, treasury files. We have details about Epstein henchman who carried out his orders, information about banks looking the other way, government agencies sleepwalking, and I think that it’s just important now if you’re looking at a rigged financial system to make sure that all the facts come out.
SHAPIRO: Just named a lot of different potential players from banks to co-conspirators to government agencies. Where do you hope these trails lead? What do you hope gets illuminated?
WYDEN: What I want to do is make sure that the point person in the Trump administration, the Attorney General, looks at the treasury material. I just mentioned these 4,700 wire transfers. Now, the Trump administration said, oh, nothing to see here. Well, I just told you about 4,000 potential lines of investigation. And sex trafficking is one of the ugliest crimes, one of the worst practices, you know, imaginable. And Epstein was running a global ring.
SHAPIRO: You said that there are 4,700 transactions here. And…
WYDEN: That is at just one bank, Ari, only one, and he dealt with a number of banks, including apparently Russian banks.
SHAPIRO: Can we explain for listeners just a little bit how this investigation worked? My understanding is that banks file suspicious activity reports with the Treasury Department, which then puts them in a database, which law enforcement can access, but you had to negotiate for your staff to get access?
WYDEN: That’s correct. And during the Biden administration, we were able to do it. And Republicans were also involved in a number of these investigations. Let me step back a little bit and tell you how we started. We were concerned about a billionaire on Wall Street who gave $158 million to Jeffrey Epstein and said it was for finance management and taxes and the like. So we kept digging, and that’s when we decided to go after the SARs and the information on Epstein.
SHAPIRO: We asked the Treasury Department about this as well as the Justice Department. The Justice Department had no comment, but a treasury spokesperson said the Biden administration had access to this information during its tenure. The fact that Senator Wyden never asked Joe Biden or Merrick Garland, who is then Attorney General, to address this matter shows this is, quote, “pathetic political theater and a complete joke.” How do you respond?
WYDEN: That’s just factually wrong. We asked the Treasury Department during the Biden administration to show us the materials, show us the suspicious activity reports. They did. We asked Republicans to join us in efforts to do some subpoenas afterwards to get more information, and Republican senators weren’t willing to do that.
SHAPIRO: And yet, the public letter that you have written to the Attorney General laying out specific points that you would like the AG to pursue, you didn’t send a letter along those lines to Merrick Garland when he was Attorney General, did you?
WYDEN: Well, I went further. We asked to sit with them and look at the files. They allowed us to do it. And we wanted to have a bipartisan effort from that point on, and the Senate Republicans were unwilling to do it.
SHAPIRO: Do you believe that there are financial crimes here that the money was not just used to fund criminal activities involving sex trafficking but that the transfers themselves were criminal?
WYDEN: Certainly a possibility. When you have hundreds of millions of dollars moving through these banks, I think there’s certainly a serious prospect that a number of the transactions that were described involved a host of crimes.
SHAPIRO: That is Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. Thank you for speaking with us today.
WYDEN: Thanks, Ari.
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