For example, on Feb. 9, a Facebook user claimed (archived) the alleged story was new:
Just released files are showing trump made over 4,725 wire transfers to epstein totalling over 1.1 billion dollars. If you can't make the connection between that many money transfers from a convicted rapist to a convicted pedophile running the largest child trafficking ring in history. Your a special kind of stupid.
Contrary to the Facebook user's caption, the claim had circulated online since July 2025, as an X post showed (archived).
The rumor stemmed from findings by the office of U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon who featured in the X post's video. However, while the posts accurately relayed the number of transactions and the amount they totaled, they incorrectly attributed them all to Trump. For this reason, we have deemed the claim false.
On July 17, 2025, Wyden spoke in a Senate session about files related to Epstein that his team had found at the U.S. Department of Treasury. His speech streamed live on C-SPAN (at the 2 hour and 47 minute mark):
Wyden said his investigative team had found the following details in the Treasury files in 2024 when then President Joe Biden gave them permission to do so:
Somewhere in the Treasury Department, Mr. President [Trump], locked away in a cabinet drawer is a big Epstein file that's full of actionable information, follow-the-money details about his financing and operations that await investigation. Last year, the Biden administration allowed our investigators to look at portions of the file. We did that at the Treasury Building.
Here is what it says. Treasury's Epstein file details, Mr. President, 4,725 wire 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 4000 potential lines of investigation right there. Hundreds of millions more flowed through other accounts. That's even a lot more to investigate.
The file shows that Mr. Epstein used multiple Russian banks, which are now under sanctions, to process payments related to sex trafficking. A lot of the women and girls he targeted came from Russia, Belarus, Turkey and elsewhere. One shudders to think about the kinds of people who must have been involved in trafficking these women and young girls out of those companies and into the Epstein web of abuse.
Again, these are all potential leads, Mr. President, the Department of Justice ought to be digging into. This is about years and years of international sex trafficking.
However, at no point in his speech did Wyden say or suggest Trump was one of the people on the other end of the transactions, let alone all of them. Instead, he urged the administration to investigate the transactions, which he called "potential leads."
Prior to speaking in the Senate, Wyden had spoken to The New York Times and told the publication that his team had been carrying out an inquiry on "Epstein's financial network for the past three years," revealing that Wyden's efforts were not new and that his team had access to bank records, which are confidential, according to federal law. Wyden cannot release the records himself, which is why he was urging the Trump administration to do so in his Senate address.
A member of Wyden's investigative team on the Senate Finance Committee, of which the senator is the ranking member, as of this writing, told Snopes that the investigation started with the goal of creating legislation to prevent tax evasion. Investigators in Congress are not allowed to start inquiries without a legislative goal. The aide confirmed the New York Times' reporting that the team was looking, specifically, into money exchanges between Epstein and Leon Black, the cofounder of Apollo Global Management, Inc., a private equity behemoth with $938 billion under management as of Dec. 31, 2025.
Black paid Epstein "$170 million for tax planning advice that was not worth nearly that amount," according to the aide. Black's net worth was $13.3 billion as of this writing, according to Forbes. His wealth, the aide said, would have given him "access to the best tax lawyers and accountants in the world, and he could have paid them a fraction of that price for the same advice."
"It's all just enormously suspect," the aide added. He said that several times since Trump took office, the team asked the new presidential administration to release these documents to the Finance Committee so they can continue to investigate, to no avail.
Asked if these documents had already been investigated, the aide said, "We do know that none of the tax work Epstein did for Leon Black was audited by the Internal Revenue Service."
The aide further explained that federal law compels banks to conduct checks on customers' accounts. "What the law says is that when [banks] think something fishy is going on, they're supposed to file these documents with the Treasury Department," the aide said. "It's supposed to provide a lead for law enforcement. To our knowledge, there has been no investigation here."
The aide added that these documents had been filed after Epstein was arrested and, in some cases, after Epstein died, when it would have been too late to stop criminal activity on Epstein's part.