(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Maria Farmer was the first person to file a complaint with the FBI against billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, alleging in 1996 that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell had sexually abused her.
The FBI failed to act, allowing countless children to be sexually abused over the next two decades until Epstein was finally arrested in July 2019—reportedly dying in his prison cell under mysterious circumstances about a month later.
Farmer wants to know why the FBI failed to act.
Her lawyer, Jennifer Freeman, sent an open letter Tuesday to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Attorney General Merrick Garland and DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz—demanding an investigation into why the bureau allowed Epstein to run amok.
“Epstein’s and Maxwell’s victims, and the public at large, are owed a full accounting of the FBI many failures and missed opportunities. The American people, the victims, and the survivors deserve the truth,” Freeman said. “We hereby request that a full and fair investigation be promptly launched into the FBI’s seriously bungled examination and mismanagement of the crimes committed by Epstein and others.”
Freeman’s letter includes a likely reason for why Epstein’s crimes went unchecked: The lawyer noted that the billionaire pedophile may have been an FBI informant.
“The FBI closed a forfeiture proceeding against Epstein, noting ‘Epstein… has provided information to the FBI as agreed upon,’” she said, quoting an FBI report.
“There is strong circumstantial evidence in the public domain that Epstein’s special relationship with the government explains the FBI’s failure to investigate or prosecute Epstein in 1996, the special treatment he received from 2005 to2008, and the failure to investigate the possible wrongdoing of important public officials and powerful businessmen.”
Freeman’s letter follows new evidence that Epstein was indeed a government asset. Newly released Epstein documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal this week reportedly show that the sex trafficker had several meetings with current CIA director William Burns in 2014.
Epstein isn’t the only sex criminal the FBI allowed to slide for years, as noted in Freeman’s letter. The bureau also failed to investigate Larry Nassar, the former team doctor of the U.S. women’s national gymnastics team, for his sexual abuse of gymnasts.
Other instances of FBI failures included in Freeman’s letter were the Parkland and Charleston mass shootings, as the bureau had ignored credible intelligence warning about those events.
“Much like the Parkland, Nassar, and Charleston Church cases, government agencies have a responsibility to investigate and explain why the FBI failed—for a quarter of a century—to properly investigate Ms. Farmer’s and others’ repeated allegations of Epstein’s abuse,” Freeman said.
“Those failures allowed his sex trafficking to continue unabated for decades. It is imperative that the Epstein allegations similarly be accorded the ‘utmost seriousness and urgency that they deserved and required’ and that the Epstein victims are also brought ‘some modicum of justice.’”
The FBI has declined to comment on Freeman’s letter.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
