The New Republic

07/23/2025

That review brought to Wyden’s attention the $1.5 billion in suspicious transactions flagged to Treasury by big banks, which is detailed in the Times report. Wyden’s letter fleshes out these revelations, noting starkly that Treasury’s “Epstein file contains significant information on the sources of funding behind Epstein’s sex trafficking activities.”

That appears to mean Wyden’s investigators saw evidence in those SARS that a large chunk of the money that passed through Epstein’s network was related to that sex trafficking. As the letter notes:

Epstein clearly had access to enormous financing to operate his sex trafficking network, and the details on how he got the cash to pay for it are sitting in a Treasury Department filing cabinet.

To be fair, it’s unclear whether DOJ has or has not examined these Treasury files; it’s possible it has done so. But Wyden’s office notes that at minimum, DOJ has a responsibility to say whether it has done this and, if so, what this review unearthed. DOJ has not replied to Wyden’s questions in this regard, his office says.

Wyden’s letter also lays out other lines of inquiry for DOJ, urging examination of a number of specific payments to Epstein by several wealthy financiers that his investigators discovered. The letter also suggests subpoenaing banks that filed these SARS, in case they failed to report on Epstein-related transactions that remain unknown.

In an intriguing move, Wyden also presses DOJ to examine “hundreds of millions of dollars in wire transfers” discovered by his investigators that passed through “several now-sanctioned Russian banks.” The latter adds suggestively: “It appears that these wire transfers were correlated to the movement of women or girls around the world.”

Wyden also urges DOJ to investigate banks that failed to report on suspicious Epstein transfers in a timely manner and to depose bankers who presided over large Epstein-related transactions, among other things.