Is This Why The Treasury Secretary is Blocking Epstein's Financial Records?
Bessent, Kushner, and the $55 billion EA deal nobody is connecting.
Two weeks ago, British police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on suspicion of misconduct in public office. Four days later, they arrested Peter Mandelson on the same charge. Thorbjørn Jagland, the former Norwegian prime minister who ran both the Nobel Committee and the Council of Europe, is under investigation. Miroslav Lajčák, the former president of the UN General Assembly, is under investigation. French prosecutors opened a probe into former culture minister Jack Lang. Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway is facing scrutiny over hundreds of emails she exchanged with Epstein.
Across the Atlantic, the response from the United States government has been virtually nothing, and the reason for that silence is the story I am about to tell you.
If you have been following my work, you know why I think that is. Last month I published a piece connecting Jared Kushner to Jeffrey Epstein through Deutsche Bank. I showed you how prosecutors asked about merging those investigations one month after Epstein died, how the compliance officer who flagged both accounts was fired, how the banker who oversaw the overlap was found hanged while the FBI was trying to interview him, and how 102 politically exposed persons were hidden inside Deutsche Bank’s system by a single employee and never identified.
Since then I have kept digging and what I found is bigger than Deutsche Bank and Kushner. If the connections suggested in these documents hold, the implications would rank among the most significant national security story in modern American history.
The House Oversight Committee released millions of pages of Epstein Task Force documents, identified by EFTA numbers, through an official Congressional process. Those include the FBI reports, the Deutsche Bank testimony, the Bannon emails, and the prosecutor communications I will reference. Separately, a trove of Ehud Barak’s personal emails were leaked in 2024 through a hack attributed to a group called Handala. Those leaked emails include corporate board presentations, intelligence reports, and business correspondence that were never meant to be public.
Now, I thought it might be fun to bring you into the investigation. I will tell you clearly which source I am drawing from at each step so you can evaluate the evidence on its own terms. I will also tell you clearly when something is documented fact, when it is a credible allegation, and when I am asking a question the evidence raises. That is how this works, consider yourself my research partner.
The Man Hiding the Money
If you have been reading my work, you already know some of what I am about to tell you because I first reported on it in January in my piece “The Epstein Blueprint.” But we are going to walk through it again here because it is the thread that ties everything else together, and I have found more since then.
In 2024, there was a trove of emails from Ehud Barak’s personal archive that were leaked and subsequently reported on by investigative reporter Jack Poulson, whose work documenting the corporate structures and client relationships in those emails has been foundational to this investigation.
As a reminder, Barak is the former Israeli prime minister who was one of Epstein’s closest associates, visiting him approximately 30 times between 2013 and 2017 and also the one Virginia Guiffre accused of assult. In those leaked emails, Barak ran an intelligence consulting firm called Ergo (E.B. 2014) Ltd, one of three Israeli companies Barak created with names forming the Latin phrase “Cogito, ergo sum,” meaning “I think, therefore I am.”
The three entities were Cogito (E.B.) 2015 Ltd, Ergo (E.B. 2014) Ltd, and Sum (E.B.) 2015 LP, and as Poulson documented, the Sum structure was designed by Darren K. Indyke, Epstein’s longtime lawyer. Ergo produced intelligence reports that were sold to hedge fund managers as commercial products, the kind of research Wall Street pays for to get an edge on geopolitical developments.
As Poulson reported, a May 23, 2014 email from Ergo’s managing partner Evan Pressman named Scott Bessent as a client.
A June 23, 2014 email referenced a “co-investment arrangement with one of the world’s largest family offices” using the code name “Sterling,” a reference to Soros Fund Management named after the 1992 currency crisis where Soros made $1 billion betting against the British pound, the same crisis where Bessent made his reputation. Bessent served as Chief Investment Officer of Soros Fund managing approximately $25 billion.
In May 2015, a Soros Fund staffer emailed requesting that someone described as “working with Scott Bessent” be added to Barak’s Ergo distribution list, and Bessent’s own personal assistant coordinated calendar meetings with Barak’s wife regarding potential meetings during Barak’s New York visits.
Great, but what does any of it actually mean? Here is why the corporate structure matters: By January 2016, Epstein’s Southern Trust Company, the U.S. Virgin Islands entity he wholly owned, became a limited partner in Sum, acquiring 50% ownership. The same corporate entity that received consulting payments from Bessent’s Soros Fund Management, Ergo (E.B. 2014) Ltd, served as the general partner for Sum (E.B.) 2015 LP, meaning Ergo controlled how Sum's money was invested and where it went. Epstein's money flowed into Sum, and Ergo decided what happened to it.
Epstein’s money then flowed through Sum into an Israeli emergency technology company called Carbyne, where Barak served as chairman.
I documented in my investigation last October how Epstein's money flowed through Southern Trust into Carbyne, the Israeli emergency call platform that can remotely activate a caller's smartphone camera, GPS, and audio, chaired by Barak with Unit 8200 veterans, now embedded in 911 systems serving millions of Americans through partnerships with AT&T and agencies across the country.
So now, let’s follow the money: Bessent ran a fund that paid Barak's company, likely for intelligence reports. Barak's company was also the entity that controlled where Epstein's money went. Epstein's lawyer Darren Indyke designed it that way, so that the same door Bessent's money walked in through was the same door Epstein's money walked in through, and on the other side of that door, one of the things was Carbyne, the surveillance technology now embedded in American 911 systems. The man who oversaw the fund that was a client of Ergo is now the Secretary of the Treasury, which means he controls the financial records that could map the full pipeline, he chairs the regulatory body reviewing the EA deal (we’ll get into that), and he runs the agency where banks are supposed to report suspicious transactions.
In the Barak leaked files, I found an Ergo intelligence report dated July 2, 2014, just weeks after Bessent was named as a client.
The report attributed information to a source described as a “20-year friend and geopolitical advisor to Putin” who had “met with him in past two weeks,” and another source described as a “current analyst for the United States Department of Defense.” If these source descriptions are accurate, Ergo was selling intelligence products containing information from inside both the Russian government and the U.S. military, packaged as a commercial product and distributed to hedge fund clients. Bessent, as CIO of Soros Fund Management, was likely receiving these reports during this period.
I need you to hold that in your mind while I tell you what Bessent is doing right now.
As Treasury Secretary, Bessent chairs something called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, and what CFIUS does is act as the gatekeeper for any deal where a foreign government wants to buy an American company. If the deal could give that government access to sensitive American data or technology or infrastructure, CFIUS is supposed to block it or force changes. It is the single most important national security checkpoint for foreign acquisitions, and the man sitting at the top of it right now is the same man who has refused Senator Wyden's requests three times to release Epstein's Treasury financial records.
Bessent’s CFIUS is currently reviewing the largest deal of its kind in history: the $55 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts by a group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund I mentioned earlier. It’s super important we all understand what EA actually holds and why this is about more than a video game company changing hands.
EA has the personal data, the behavioral profiles, the spending patterns, the social connections, and the communication records of more than 700 million users worldwide, which is more than twice the population of the United States.
Gaming data captures how people make decisions under pressure, how they respond to different kinds of stimuli, how they spend money, and who they interact with. That is not entertainment data. That is a behavioral surveillance goldmine, and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund will own approximately 93% of it if this deal closes.
Kushner’s Affinity Partners holds 5% equity in the deal, which at $55 billion means his firm stands to hold roughly $2.75 billion in ownership. Multiple members of Congress have stated on the record that Kushner’s involvement exists for one reason: to make the deal politically impossible to block, because no CFIUS review under this administration is going to reject a deal involving the President’s son-in-law.
But this gets even bigger if you can believe it. In February 2024, Kushner co-founded an AI company called Brain Co. with $30 million co-led by Affinity Partners and a strategic partnership with OpenAI. Brain Co. builds artificial intelligence tools designed to process massive datasets and turn them into actionable intelligence for governments and corporations. If Saudi Arabia owns the 700 million user profiles and Kushner’s AI company builds the tools to analyze that kind of data for governments, you are looking at one side of the table owning the raw information and the other side of the table building the machine that reads it, and both sides are funded by the same Gulf sovereign wealth flowing through the same man. I will come back to Brain Co. later in this piece but I wanted you to see the connection here first.
Now, as Treasury Secretary, Bessent also oversees the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN, which is the agency that receives suspicious activity reports from banks (SARs). The suspicious activity reports that Tammy Hill McFadden tried to file about Epstein and Kushner’s overlapping Deutsche Bank accounts go to FinCEN, and the billion-dollar SAR that JPMorgan filed on Epstein’s transactions goes to FinCEN. All of it sits inside the department Bessent runs.
And yes, as I mentioned, Senator Ron Wyden has asked Bessent three times to release Epstein’s Treasury Department financial records to the Senate Finance Committee, on March 11, 2025, June 16, 2025, and September 2, 2025. These are records that contain over 4,725 wire transfers totaling more than $1.08 billion from a single JPMorgan account involving Epstein and his associates, plus $170 million in payments from Leon Black.
Wyden’s staff reviewed a portion of them in person at Treasury in 2024 and were so alarmed they asked to take copies, but they were refused. Wyden has since introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act to compel Bessent to release them. Then in January of this year, he expanded his investigation further, uncovering that Bank of New York Mellon had moved $378 million in Epstein transactions through 270 wire transfers and failed to identify a legitimate business purpose for any of them.
The Mellon banking dynasty that built that institution is the same family whose heir, Timothy Mellon, gave $130 million directly to the Pentagon during the government shutdown to pay military salaries that were already being covered through redirected Pentagon funds. This was a largely symbolic gesture that legal experts said likely violated federal law, and that made him one of Trump's most visible financial patrons after already donating over $165 million to his 2024 campaign.
Despite all of that, Bessent has refused every single request, and his department called Wyden’s demands “political theater” and claimed there are “no hidden files at Treasury.”
On September 3, 2025, Wyden accused Bessent of being “a willing participant in the Trump administration’s Epstein cover-up.” On January 15 of this year, Wyden said: “Secretary Bessent is blocking investigators from following the money, and it’s long past time for him to get out of the way.” And on the Senate floor he stated plainly: “If the Trump administration wasn’t running a full-on pedophile protection program, these investigations would already be underway.”
So here is the picture again before we move on. The man blocking Congressional access to Epstein’s financial records oversaw the fund that paid for services as a client of a business designed largely by Epstein’s lawyer, a company that later received Epstein’s money through Southern Trust and channeled it into Carbyne, the surveillance technology now embedded in American 911 systems.
That same business seems to have produced intelligence reports containing information attributed to sources inside the Russian government and the U.S. Department of Defense. That same man now chairs the committee reviewing whether to approve the largest leveraged buyout in history, a deal that would hand 700 million user accounts to Saudi Arabia, brokered by the President’s son-in-law, financed by the same JPMorgan that filed a billion-dollar Epstein SAR nobody acted on.
As I wrote in January, I am not claiming Bessent personally knew Epstein or was aware of Epstein’s involvement with these structures, he IS AWARE now. So even if Bessent’s involvement was completely innocent, this is a massive conflict of interest, because he cannot be the person deciding whether to release records about a network he personally was connected to.
What I cannot prove is whether Bessent knew about Epstein’s involvement, what investment decisions may have been informed by Ergo’s intelligence products, or whether Bessent’s current refusal to release records is connected to his past relationship with Barak’s firm. What I can say is that these are questions that deserve investigation, and the person who would need to answer them is the same person blocking the records that would help answer them.
The Technology They Built
Carbyne was co-founded by Barak with Epstein’s funding through his company called Southern Trust. Carbyne builds software for 911 call centers that can remotely activate a caller’s smartphone camera, GPS, and audio, and it was deployed into emergency services systems across the United States.
According to reporting, Axon, the company formerly known as Taser, completed its acquisition of Carbyne for $625 million just last month, in February 2026. Axon makes the vast majority of body cameras used by American police departments and the technology that can remotely activate your phone through a 911 call is now owned by the same company that records what police officers see and do.
The deal was all cash, which means $625 million went directly to the shareholders and investors who held stakes in a company that was funded by Epstein’s money through Southern Trust and Sum, chaired by Barak, and partially owned by Andrew Intrater, the cousin of sanctioned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. I keep asking myself who received that $625 million payout and where it went, whether any of it flowed back through the same corporate structures Indyke designed, and whether the Cogito/Ergo/Sum pipeline that moved Epstein’s money into Carbyne in the first place generated returns that went somewhere nobody has been able to trace. These are exactly the kinds of questions that would be answered by the Treasury records Bessent is sitting on, and exactly the kinds of questions his refusal to release those records prevents anyone from answering.
And while Bessent blocks those records, the man whose Deutsche Bank accounts overlapped with Epstein’s, whose financial vulnerabilities Epstein was tracking in real time, whose $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund came after the fund’s own advisors called the investment “unsatisfactory in all aspects,” is right now brokering the largest transfer of American personal data to a foreign government in history. The Carbyne acquisition put Epstein-funded surveillance technology inside American police infrastructure for $625 million. What Jared Kushner is doing right now makes that look small.
What Is Happening Right Now
On September 29, 2025, a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund announced it was buying Electronic Arts for $55 billion. Kushner’s Affinity Partners holds 5% equity in the deal, which means his firm stands to hold roughly $2.75 billion in ownership. JPMorgan is providing $18 billion of the $20 billion in debt financing, which means most of this purchase is being paid with borrowed money, not the buyers’ cash.
Shareholders approved the deal with 99% of votes cast in December 2025, federal antitrust regulators cleared it on February 9, 2026, and the deal is expected to close by June 30, 2026.
The only remaining regulatory hurdle is CFIUS review under Bessent, and multiple analysts and sources close to the deal have told reporters they expect it to pass given Kushner’s relationship with his father-in-law and with MBS.
People close to the negotiations told Reuters that Kushner “brokered the initial connection” between EA and the Saudi fund and “for months acted as a central figure in the talks.” Sources also told reporters that Kushner’s involvement would “ease the deal’s path through CFIUS.” The Center for Economic and Policy Research stated plainly that Kushner “provides Saudi Arabia with political cover and regulatory protection in exchange for guaranteed fees.”
NYU’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights warned that Saudi Arabia “has a well-documented track record of using digital technology to attack those who criticize its actions” and that the kingdom “has invested heavily in advanced surveillance technology, prosecuted online dissent, and used spyware against journalists, activists, and even foreign critics.”
Senators Blumenthal and Warren wrote directly to Bessent urging “searching scrutiny” of the deal, noting that Kushner’s involvement “raises troubling questions about whether Mr. Kushner is involved in the transaction solely to ensure the federal government’s approval.”
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund will own approximately 93% of a company holding the personal data and behavioral profiles of more than 700 million users worldwide, reviewed by the CFIUS chairman who is blocking Epstein’s financial records, financed by the same JPMorgan that filed a billion-dollar Epstein suspicious activity report nobody acted on, and brokered by the man Epstein was tracking through Deutsche Bank.
As I documented in my last piece, the FBI’s vetted source reported in an official FD-1023 that Kushner “moved a lot of Russian investment money around.” The Senate Finance Committee concluded that Affinity’s investors “may not be motivated by commercial considerations, but rather the opportunity to funnel foreign government money to members of President Trump’s family.” Through July 2024, Affinity had collected $157 million in management fees, $87 million of that from Saudi Arabia alone, while generating zero returns for investors.
And here is a timeline detail I keep coming back to. When Kushner set up Affinity Partners, his foreign investors put in billions with an agreement that they would leave their money locked in the fund for a set number of years. That lock-up period expires in August 2026, which means Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE will have the right to pull their money back out of Kushner's fund. If they do, the fund loses billions in capital overnight and effectively collapses, which is especially devastating given that Affinity has generated zero returns for investors while collecting $157 million in management fees. The EA deal is expected to close in June. The withdrawal window opens in August. So Kushner helps Saudi Arabia acquire 700 million user profiles first, and then two months later those same Saudis decide whether his fund survives or dies. That is a foreign government holding a kill switch over the President's son-in-law's entire business on a published timeline during an active presidential term, and every single person involved in this deal knows it.
The Next Generation
I wish it ended there but there is something else happening right now that I need you to see.
In February 2024, Kushner co-founded a company called Brain Co. with a $30 million investment from Affinity Partners and a strategic partnership with OpenAI. The company builds AI decision-making infrastructure for governments and Fortune 2000 companies, meaning it designs artificial intelligence tools that process massive datasets and turn them into recommendations for the people in charge. Its board included Luis Videgaray, the former foreign minister of Mexico, and former Trump administration officials who are described as “facilitating partnerships.” The CEO told reporters that “at the technology level and the AI capability level, a lot of the use cases look very similar,” meaning the company is targeting all sectors simultaneously rather than specializing.
The operational model is identical to Carbyne: tech that is framed as commercially useful, politically connected people founding and/or running it, foreign sovereign wealth funding, and surveillance capability invisible inside the commercial product. The difference is that Carbyne needed Epstein’s offshore structures and a former head of state to chair it, while Brain Co. does not need any of that because the middleman is the son-in-law of the President.
If Saudi Arabia owns EA’s 700 million user profiles and Kushner’s AI company builds the tools to analyze that kind of data for governments, you are looking at one side of the table owning the raw information and the other side of the table building the machine that reads it, and both sides are funded by the same Gulf sovereign wealth flowing through the same man.
So Kushner simultaneously manages billions in Gulf sovereign wealth through Affinity, brokers the largest foreign acquisition of an American tech company through the EA deal, co-founds an AI company building government decision-making infrastructure through Brain Co., and sits on the Board of Peace overseeing reconstruction planning for Gaza that was “explicitly pitched as prime opportunities for private equity investment” at Davos in January 2026, with the same Gulf states backing Affinity positioned to provide the financing. Every single one of these roles creates leverage for the foreign governments funding him, and every single one follows the model the network perfected.
What Exists and Who Is Blocking It
I want to end by telling you exactly what records exist, where they are, and who is preventing them from being produced, because the story here is that the evidence to confirm or deny everything I have documented is sitting in specific filing cabinets controlled by specific people with specific and documented reasons to keep it locked away.
At the Treasury Department, under Bessent’s control: more than 4,725 wire transfers totaling over $1.08 billion in Epstein transactions, suspicious activity reports (which are the legally required filings banks make when transactions look like they could involve money laundering, fraud, or other crimes) from Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, and now Bank of New York Mellon documenting hundreds of millions more, and a complete map of Epstein’s financial network including the names of everyone who transacted with him. Wyden’s staff saw a portion of these records in 2024 and was alarmed enough to try to take copies, and they were refused. Bessent has blocked their release for over a year.
At Deutsche Bank, never produced: the identities of 102 politically exposed persons (meaning people in public office or close to power, who banks are supposed to flag for extra scrutiny because of the risk of bribery and corruption) hidden in “deferred” status by a single employee, the complete results of Tammy Hill McFadden’s compliance review of both Epstein and Kushner accounts, the suppressed suspicious activity reports she tried to file, and the records Thomas Bowers could have explained before he died.
At the Department of Justice: the complete investigative file from when SDNY prosecutors asked whether to merge the Epstein and Kushner investigations, whatever happened after that September 2019 email, and the reason the merged investigation was never built.
At CFIUS, under Bessent’s chairmanship: the full national security review of the EA acquisition, including whatever assessment has been made of Saudi surveillance capabilities and the risks of handing 700 million user profiles to a government that has used digital technology against journalists, activists, and critics.
Every one of these records exists, and every one of them could either confirm what I have described or reveal an innocent explanation that I would be the first to report. The fact that every single pathway to these records runs through people with documented connections to the network those records would expose is either the most remarkable coincidence in the history of American government or it is the answer to the question nobody in power wants asked.
The people arrested abroad were arrested because documents proved they shared information with Epstein while holding public office. The documents I have been analyzing prove something far larger happened here. The only question is whether anyone with the authority to act will do so before the EA deal closes in June, before the Affinity withdrawal deadline passes in August, and before the surveillance architecture built by this network becomes so deeply embedded in American infrastructure that removing it becomes impossible.
This is where I need your help. Share this with the people in your life who need to see it, subscribe if you have not already, and talk about what you have read here, because the institutions that were designed to pursue accountability have been captured by the people who need to be held accountable, and the only force left that can change that is an informed public that refuses to look away.
- Kait Justice
This is great, very revealing, and deserves congressional attention. Sen. Wyden is my senator and I'm proud he's pursuing this. One small item that fits with this (minor detail compared to those sums) is Trump JR's appointment to "Unusual Machines" drone company right after dad's election in 2024, followed a year later with Defense Department massive funds to the same company. Drones are all about collecting information, so there's another link. And now that FCC is shutting down all imports of drones from the rest of the world, Jr will get more money. It's a family grift. Company is in Florida of course.
This really is the Epstein administration. God, it's such a tangled web. Thank you for your work!