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WASHINGTON — A former associate ofdeceased pedophile Jeffrey Epsteinis funding Democrat James Talarico’s run for the US Senate — to the tune of at least $11.5 million contributed to asuper PAC backing the Texas candidate.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman gave the bulk of that sum in the form of a $10 million check cut to Lone Star Rising PAC this past June, months after afterTalarico won a bad-tempered primaryover Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings.
Lone Star Rising spent nearly $4.5 million opposing Crockett ahead of the March primary — and is now ramping up spending against Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton as Talarico bids to become the first Democrat elected to rep the state in the Senate since 1988, while vowing to ban the very organizations from which his campaign is benefitting.
Talarico, 37, has frequently attacked Paxton over an “Epstein-style sweetheart deal” his office reached to secure a guilty plea from Adam Dean Hoffman, a Waco lawyer initially charged with felony sexual abuse of a young child.
Hoffman’s trial ended in a mistrial and his alleged victim declined to testify again. Hoffman reached a deal with prosecutors allowing him to plead guilty to misdemeanor indecent assault and displaying harmful material to a minor. He was sentenced to 60 days in jail, was released after 29 days and did not have to register as a sex offender.
“The Epstein Class has no place in Texas,” Talarico has said, insinuating that wealthy and powerful individuals have been able to evade justice because of their association with Epstein, who counted scholars, celebrities and world leaders among his coterie before committing suicide in a Manhattan federal lockup while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in August 2019.
Talarico has also called for Paxton’s office to “Release the Hoffman Files” — imitating advocacy for the release of the so-called “Epstein Files” by the US Department of Justice last year.
Hoffman appears many times in those files, bothinteracting with the disgraced financierand talking about trips to Epstein’sinfamous private Caribbean island, as well as his Manhattan penthouse and New Mexico ranch.
“Jeffrey has exquisite taste in people (myself excepted),” Hoffmanwrote of Epsteinina September 2014 emailin which the financier connected him with Hardeep Singh Puri, then India’s ambassador to the United Nations and currently the country’s oil minister.
Other emails disclosed that Hoffman told Epstein on Christmas Eve 2014 that he’d mailed gifts that included a surfer statue for the money manager’s Little St. James Island and ice cream “either for yourself or for ‘the girls.’”
In August 2015, Epstein claimed in an email to have had a “wild” dinner with Hoffman and fellow tech moguls Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Hoffman claimed in a February statement that he only engaged with Epstein to fundraise for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, even though several of those meetings occurred after Epstein was forced to register as a sex offender in 2008 after pleading guilty to soliciting a minor for sex in Palm Beach, Fla.
“The victims of Epstein’s abhorrent and vile actions deserve all the information they are seeking, and I continue to call on President Trump to deliver that for them,” Hoffman said on X at the time.
I only knew Jeffrey Epstein because of a fundraising relationship with MIT, which I very much regret. In 2019 I told Axios the last meeting I had with him was in 2015 but I was mistaken, as according to calendar entries I have become aware there were additional fundraising…
