For nearly a year, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has been calling on the Donald Trump administration to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. Well, they’ve been released — and it turns out some of Hochul’s wealthiest donors from recent campaigns are in them.
The release of the files, and the fact that some of the richest people who have contributed to her in the past are littered throughout them, puts her in an awkward position. As New York state budget negotiations come to a head, Hochul is steadfastly resisting calls to hike taxes on New York’s ultrarich to fund the universal childcare she has made a core part of her reelection platform.
But her refusal to tax the wealthy also undermines her strict condemnation of the very Epstein-linked billionaires she has demanded be exposed — a number of whom have given generously to her.
One is Ukrainian-born British American billionaire Leonard Blavatnik, who recently became responsible for the most expensive home purchase in Hamptons history after buying an 8.5-acre mansion on Long Island’s south shore. Blavatnik, who is worth around $30 billion, maxed out to Hochul in 2022 with $69,700, according to campaign finance data from OpenSecrets.
Emails show Blavatnik was also connected to Epstein and his social circle. As early as July 2009 — a year after Epstein started serving a prison sentence for the crime of child prostitution — Epstein requested that his friend, Hollywood publicist Peggy Siegal, get in touch with the billionaire and see if he could find a job in Moscow for an unnamed woman he knew.
“[T]ell him she is a friend of [G]hislaine [Maxwell],” he wrote, while instructing her to “[l]eave my name out of it.” More than a decade later, Maxwell would be charged and convicted as Epstein’s coconspirator.
“Len Blavatnik had no business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, was not a close friend, and they did not socialize, and any suggestion otherwise is false,” a spokesperson for Access…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
