The Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues to plague the Trump administration, and on Wednesday, a prominent Democratic senator called for Congress to investigate the financial ties between the dead sex criminal and a host of financial organizations and people, including tech billionaire Peter Thiel.
Much of the debate about the “Epstein files” has centered around what records the Justice Department may have on his illicit sex crimes but, according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), the more important files may actually be at the Commerce Department, where evidence of the dead financier’s financial activities seem to connect him to a wide variety of wealthy and influential people and institutions.
One of those people, according to Wyden, is Thiel, whose venture capital firm is reported to have previously taken a large amount of money from the dead financier. In June, the New York Times reported that in 2015 and 2016, not long before his death, Epstein invested some $40 million with a company that Thiel had co-founded, Valar Ventures. Like many of Thiel’s other companies, Valar takes its name from J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythos.
The news that Thiel’s company enjoyed a not insignificant relationship with Epstein was interesting, given that, in public, Thiel has tended to speak about Epstein in fairly abstract terms. While Thiel has admitted that he met Epstein a few times, he has always given the impression that he didn’t know him very well. Last year, Thiel went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and spent a significant amount of time talking about Epstein, albeit mostly to emphasize the dead financier’s ties to a number of prominent, left-leaning tech executives—such as Microsoft mogul Bill Gates and LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman. He also attempted to tie Epstein’s crimes to the world of “leftwing philanthropy.”
On Wednesday, Wyden introduced legislation that would force the government to produce documents related to Epstein’s financial activities. Wyden’s office announced:
Following new revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s deep and long-running relationship with J.P Morgan, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., today introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act (PETRA) to compel Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to turn over Epstein-related Treasury records to Senate investigators. Finance Committee staff reviewed a large portion of those files in person at the Treasury Department in 2024. Senator Wyden has sought to obtain the complete set for further investigation, but Bessent has repeatedly refused to produce them to the committee and downplayed their significance.
Thiel and Valar Ventures are only two of dozens of people and entities that Wyden has suggested be investigated over their financial ties to Epstein. The list includes multiple banks (including prominent Western ones like HSBC, Citibank, and Wells Fargo, and Russian banks like Alfabank and Sberbank), private equity billionaire Leon Black (who, Wyden has repeatedly pointed out, gave $170 million to Epstein for “tax advice,” which the Senator calls “an abnormal amount to pay for tax advice”), and Jean-Luc Brunel, a fashion industry model scout who in 2022 was, like Epstein, found dead in a prison cell, apparently having hanged himself.
At the time of his death, Brunel was being held on suspicion of having provided Epstein with underage girls. Also included on the list is Alan Dershowitz, the high-powered attorney, who previously represented Epstein, and whose name appears in the notorious Epstein “birthday book.”
Wyden, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, has spent the last several years attempting to get the government to probe Epstein’s cash trails. He began his probe into Epstein’s financial documents in 2022. In June, Wyden wrote to Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, asking why it had not followed through on Trump’s campaign promise to be radically transparent when it came to the Epstein files: “This Administration began with reassuring promises that the Epstein case would receive the attention and diligence it deserves … Fast forward to the present, where the released section of the Epstein files contains little relevant or groundbreaking information, with some pages entirely redacted,” the Senator wrote.
In July, Wyden laid out what he called a “blueprint” to “follow the money.” This blueprint could be used by the Justice Department to investigate Epstein’s financial relationships, he argued. DOJ prosecutors and FBI investigators could start by probing the Commerce Department’s information on “thousands of wire transfers and more than $1 billion dollars flowing in and out of Epstein’s accounts, all of which merit further investigation.”
The Justice Department has, of course, done none of this. Instead, it recently declared war on “radical gender and racial ideology” in America’s public schools. Gizmodo reached out to Thiel through his firm Palantir, as well as to the Commerce Department and the Justice Department.
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