Senator to IRS: Where were Epstein's audits?
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) pressed Trump's new tax chief on Thursday on why the agency never audited Epstein's suspicious transactions.
Weeks ago, Sen. Wyden revealed developments in his Epstein investigation on All Rise News. The senator’s probe is the center of national attention.
Support independent journalism that breaks and anticipates the biggest stories.
Forget the supposed client list.
A senator trying to get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking network wants to see whether there are any audits.
“Follow the money”
For more than three years, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has been conducting what he calls a “follow-the-money” investigation into how Epstein funded his pyramid scheme of sexual abuse of young women and girls. His investigation so far has flagged $1.5 billion in Epstein’s suspicious transactions, breaking down into thousands of wire transfers. The scandal surrounding Trump’s ties to Epstein has only intensified Wyden’s investigation.
On Thursday, Wyden pressed the Internal Revenue Service on why the agency passed on a particularly “suspect” set of transactions: sky-high payments from billionaire Leon Black to Epstein for purported tax planning services. The New York Times reported that Black paid Epstein $158 million between 2012 and 2017, and Black avoided about $1 billion in future estate tax liabilities.
“Despite Epstein’s extraordinary compensation scheme and other obvious irregularities with this arrangement, Black’s attorneys confirmed in writing to my investigators that these transactions have ‘not been reviewed by the Internal Revenue Service as part of an audit,’” Wyden told Trump’s recently appointed IRS commissioner Billy Long in a letter.
“This is disturbing, especially considering that admissions made in the U.S. Virgin Islands that this money was used to fund Epstein’s sex trafficking operations,” the letter continues. “It is unthinkable that transactions amounting to tens of millions of dollars paid to a known criminal for the purpose of helping a mega-wealthy individual dodge billions in taxes were never audited or investigated.”
Epstein already had been a convicted sex offender when Black hired him for this work.
“At an annualized rate of $34 million per year, Epstein’s compensation was double the median CEO pay for Fortune 500 companies,” Wyden wrote.
The senator noted that Epstein, a college dropout and substitute high-school schoolteacher, was not a lawyer or an accountant.
“It sure as hell ought to happen now”
During a press call today via Zoom, Wyden told reporters: “Our view is, IRS investigators should have been all over this.”
“While Epstein was still alive and getting paid for this so-called tax advice, just in this case involving Leon Black, we're talking about several payments of tens of millions of dollars from a multi-billionaire to a known sex trafficker for the purpose of dodging billions in taxes,” Wyden said.
Wyden’s letter demands that the IRS provide a list of any audits or investigations the agency performed on transactions involving Epstein by Sept. 1.
“If those investigations never happened while Epstein was still alive, it sure as hell ought to happen now,” Wyden said.
Early on in Wyden’s investigation, Epstein’s survivors pursued litigation against J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank over their alleged complicity in his sex trafficking operation. Neither case went to trial because the parties entered into settlements, but Wyden predicted more will unfold about those now-closed cases.
“I think there's much more to tell about the role of these financial institutions because to a great extent, I think they were either deliberately looking the other way, or they just said, ‘Oh, you know, we have to wait and see,’ and put it off and put it off,” Wyden told All Rise News.
“But the reality is, they really didn’t do anything in terms of their duties to protect the public until basically, everything was pretty much done,” he added.
In 2023, J.P. Morgan agreed to pay a $290 million settlement to Epstein’s survivors, and Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $75 million.
Read Wyden’s letter to the IRS here.
Watch my earlier Substack Live interview with Sen. Wyden here.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated Epstein’s educational background and has been updated.
Watch:
On Thursday night, I broke down the latest in the Epstein saga on CNN’s Laura Coates Live.
Who were Epstein’s survivors?
Unbelievable. How awful for the victims and their families.