A U.S. senator’s floor speech has gone viral, but not for anything he actually said.
“Major breaking news,” read captions on a Facebook reel and a July 27 X post. “Trump made 4,725 wire transfers to Epstein. Totaling over $1.1 billion!”
Both contained a video clip of Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., addressing his Senate colleagues.
“Treasury’s Epstein file details,” Wyden said in the video. “Four-thousand-seven-hundred-and-twenty-five transfers. Let me repeat that: 4,725 wire transfers, adding up to nearly $1.1 billion flowing in and out of just one of Mr. Epstein’s bank accounts. If you ask me, that is more than 4,000 potential lines of investigation right there.”
Social media posts misleadingly shared a clip of remarks by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., with the false claim that 4,725 wire transfers came from President Donald Trump.
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But the posts sharing the clip misrepresented what Wyden said. He did not say that these wire transfers were between Trump and Epstein, a convicted sex offender who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.
Wyden, a Senate Finance Committee member, delivered his remarks during a July 17 Senate session, days after the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation reversed course on the Trump administration’s pledge to release the Epstein investigative files.
Wyden referred to findings from a 2024 finance committee review of a Treasury Department file of Epstein-related bank documents. Part of the U.S. Treasury Department’s responsibilities include unearthing financial crimes, and the senator’s team had been looking into Epstein’s financial network for three years.
In his floor speech, Wyden urged the Trump administration to permit further investigation into Epstein’s activities by making more documents available for review.
Finance committee spokesperson Ryan Carey told PolitiFact Aug. 4 that none of those documents mentioned Trump. “But they did not review the entire Epstein file in the possession of the Treasury Department,” Carey said.
Wyden has written to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and FBI Director Kash Patel multiple times this year urging further investigation into Epstein’s financial transactions. Wyden said a Treasury official wrote back, “The Department of the Treasury has previously made documents available relating to this matter in response to your inquiries.”
Neither the FBI nor the Treasury Department answered PolitiFact’s request for information.
Epstein’s files under lock?
Wyden is among many calling for more government transparency around the Epstein case. By law, national banks must flag certain behavior, such as large transactions to individuals, foreign countries or obscure businesses, by filing “suspicious activity reports” with the Treasury Department within 60 days of detecting them. Wyden “has pushed for the Treasury to provide the Epstein documents to the Senate for further investigation,” Carey said.
The New York Times reported that Wyden’s staff found transactions involving two Russian banks to process sex-trafficking payments. Four banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon and Deutsche Bank — flagged more than $1.5 billion in transactions after Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges.
Wyden’s investigation began in 2022 by scrutinizing $158 million in payments from Apollo Global Management Cofounder Leon Black to Epstein for “tax and estate planning matters.”
Trump and Epstein were friends and ran in the same social circles in the 1990s and early 2000s before having a falling out.
Our ruling
Social media posts said Trump “made 4,725 wire transfers” to Epstein, totaling nearly $1.1 billion.
The posts included as proof a clip of Wyden talking about 4,725 wire transfers, but he didn’t say that about Trump. Wyden said Senate Finance Committee investigators reviewed a Treasury file on Epstein and found 4,725 wire transfers “flowing in and out of just one of Mr. Epstein’s bank accounts.”
A finance committee spokesperson said investigators did not see Trump mentioned in the documents they reviewed.
We rate this claim False.