"A Staggering Miscarriage of Justice"

As Senator Wyden wrote to AG Pam Bondi in July: "It is obvious that the DOJ failed to conduct a real investigation into the funding of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation."

"There's a breakthrough in the Jeffrey Epstein case," says MSNBC's Ari Melber.

He's talking about the latest reporting from The New York Times and Bloomberg which he unpacks in this video:

The Bloomberg revelations

"Federal prosecutors expanded their probe into Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes in 2007 to include potential charges of money laundering," reported a team of Bloomberg reporters on 31 October, revealing previously unreported details in a trove of 18,000 emails from Epstein’s private Yahoo email account.

Prosecutors sought grand jury issue subpoenas for every financial transaction conducted by Epstein and his six businesses dating to 2003, and also subpoenaed major banks for records about Epstein’s accounts and financial activity.

Marie Villafaña, an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of Florida, even contacted Epstein’s longtime wealth-management client, Les Wexner.

Reports Bloomberg:

Epstein grew furious when he learned that prosecutors had broadened their investigation’s scope, the emails show. His high-powered team of lawyers, including Gerald Lefcourt, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, former Bush administration official Jay Lefkowitz and former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, argued that Villafaña was pursuing baseless claims to pressure their client into a plea deal. They launched an aggressive campaign to discredit her attempts to follow the money and pressured her higher-ups to remove her and others from the case—or scuttle the case entirely....

The revelation that the investigation had a financial aspect also puts a spotlight on Alex Acosta, the former US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, who signed off on Epstein’s plea deal.

Last month, Acosta told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that he didn’t recall any discussion of “potential financial crimes.”

In May 2007, Villafaña drafted a 53-page indictment and an 82-page prosecution memo. And she urged her superiors to move swiftly because she believed Epstein was continuing to sexually abuse girls.

The evidence Villafaña collected was serious enough that she wrote in the prosecution memo that Epstein should be charged with money-laundering and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, according to the former law enforcement official.

But, reports Bloomberg, not only was Villafaña "stonewalled by senior officials at the office" she was then, in July 2007, "directed to enter into negotiations with Epstein’s legal team on a non-prosecution agreement."

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden told Bloomberg that the decision to drop the federal money laundering case as part of the government’s non-prosecution agreement was a “staggering miscarriage of justice.” 

Democratic Representative Robert Garcia, said: “This information makes it incredibly clear that there is a massive cover-up happening right now.”

The New York Times revelations

Documents unsealed in response to requests from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal show that, weeks after Epstein's death in 2019, JPMorgan flagged "about 4,700 transactions, totaling more than $1 billion, because they were potentially related to reports of human trafficking involving Mr. Epstein."

Reports The Times:

The so-called suspicious activity report that JPMorgan filed identified transactions with Leon Black, the co-founder of private equity firm Apollo Global Management; Glenn Dubin, a well-known hedge fund manager; the lawyer Alan Dershowitz; and trusts controlled by Leslie Wexner, the retail tycoon....

Several other suspicious activity reports that JPMorgan filed in the years before Mr. Epstein’s 2019 arrest were also included in the documents released on Thursday. They notified federal regulators to some of Mr. Epstein’s voluminous cash withdrawals, which experts say are a potential hallmark of money laundering and human trafficking.

Yet JPMorgan continued to do business with Mr. Epstein for years. The bank lent him money, moved his funds overseas and enabled payments to some of his sex-trafficking victims, The Times reported in September. Bank employees repeatedly raised concerns about the risks of being associated with Mr. Epstein, but senior executives decided to keep his accounts open...

The role of JPMorgan in financing Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation has drawn new scrutiny after an article in The Times detailed how the bank had repeatedly disregarded red flags about his activities, including frequent large cash withdrawals and other suspicious transactions.

These new revelations reinforce the efforts of Senate Finance Committee Ranking Democrat Ron Wyden who, in July 2025, "slammed the Trump administration’s failure to properly investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking network and financing" and urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue "seven leads for federal prosecutors based on the findings of his own years-long inquiry."

A DOJ desperate to conceal anything that could embarrass Trump

"Now, remember," says Ari Melber on YouTube:

Donald Trump's own cabinet official alleged or said that Epstein was a great blackmailer and that's how he got away with so much because not only was he doing allegedly these terrible things, some proven, some alleged, but he would then implicate other people in government, in finance, and blackmail them. And that's what Lutnick said. That hasn't been proven, but it contradicts the Trump DOJ memo that claimed there was no blackmail done, that there was nothing else to see here, nothing else to investigate. And so, you have a big problem when you have these conflicting accounts from within the Trump administration. You have President Trump continuing to refuse to do this transparency he promised and then these new reports come out and give you some insight into what was going on.

As Senator Wyden wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi in July: "It is obvious that the DOJ failed to conduct a real investigation into the funding of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation."

Increasingly, it looks like the reason Bondi is refusing to "follow the money" is because she knows exactly where it leads.

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More on YouTube: Four short videos that help explain why Trump, despite his past promises, is now so desperate to bury the Epstein Files: