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Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told All Rise News that Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has been “sitting on” a file that he provided with “actionable” information about Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship with Wall Street banks.
“I've handed the Trump administration a ready-made Epstein case involving a billionaire financier and Wall Street banks, and they have done nothing with it,” Wyden said.
Attorney General Pam Bondi recently backtracked on promises that she made early in her tenure about major revelations in the Epstein case, but Wyden calls it “ludicrous” to suggest there’s nothing more to investigate.
“I know for a fact that the Trump administration is sitting on an Epstein file that contains new actionable information,” Wyden said. “So I don't blame anybody for asking what's going on.”
Epstein’s survivors filed two class action lawsuits against J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank, accusing the banks of turning a blind eye to the late pedophile’s predation. Both lawsuits settled — for $290 million and $75 million, respectively — before going to trial in federal court in New York, preempting potentially embarrassing revelations about the Wall Street giants.
Vowing to continue his investigation, Wyden added: “I think it's critically important, and there's a lot there.”
Wyden is the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.
The Oregon senator’s investigations have a history of landing with great impact on Capitol Hill, including probes into CIA torture, mass surveillance from U.S. intelligence services, and beyond.
On top of the Epstein case, Wyden has his sights on the $16 million settlement that Paramount agreed to pay to Donald Trump’s future presidential library, ending a lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. Trump’s FCC commissioner openly tied the resolution of that lawsuit to Paramount’s ability to complete an $8 billion merger with Skydance Media, which requires FCC approval.
Wyden views the deal as nothing short of a bribe, and he will call for federal charges once Democrats retake power.
“This is very personal in the Wyden household,” the senator reflected. “My dad was a journalist, and he always said, ‘Just remember, Ron: The Founding Fathers thought that the First Amendment was almost more important than the government because it ensured that there'd be free speech.”
In 2019, I interviewed Sen. Wyden inside his office about Trump’s attempts to shut down a money laundering case against Turkish state-run bank, Halkbank, in a case that implicated the country’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Some six years ago, Trump’s first impeachment investigation was underway, and most of Capitol Hill at the time had been focused on Trump’s actions in Ukraine.
But Wyden’s probe into Trump’s Turkish ties was prescient.
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton later wrote a tell-all memoir corroborating that Trump tried to kill the Halkbank investigation because Erdogan was one of the “dictators [Trump] liked.”
Watch the full interview in the video at the top of this story.
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