WASHINGTON — A former associate of deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein is funding Democrat James Talarico’s run for the US Senate — to the tune of at least $11.5 million contributed to a super 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 after Talarico won a bad-tempered primary over 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, both interacting with the disgraced financier and talking about trips to Epstein’s infamous private Caribbean island, as well as his Manhattan penthouse and New Mexico ranch.
“Jeffrey has exquisite taste in people (myself excepted),” Hoffman wrote of Epstein in a September 2014 email in 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.
A rep for Hoffman later explained that the December 2014 email referencing “the girls,” was discussing “adult members of Epstein’s internal team who referred to themselves as ‘the girls.’” There has been no explanation as to what made the 2015 dinner “wild” from the other attendees, if such a gathering even took place.
Other contemporaneous emails indicate that Hoffman was made aware of Epstein’s time behind bars in Florida.
“[D]id reid follow up on the jail – answer surprise,” Epstein wrote to entrepreneur Joi Ito in a July 2013 email.
“About your jail thing?” replied Ito, who directed MIT’s Media Lab at the time. “I talked to him about it and he got it. He doesn’t judge people.”
The Texas Senate race is shaping up to be one of the most expensive races in the midterm cycle, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on ads.
“Our campaign has no control over contributions to any super PAC — federal law prohibits coordination between political campaigns and outside entities,” Talarico spokesman JT Ennis told The Post.
“The only way to get Big Money out of our politics is to reject politicians like Ken Paxton who want corporations and billionaires to decide our elections, not Texans,” added Ennis. “While Ken Paxton works to enrich himself and his donors, James will remain the only candidate in this race fighting to ban super PACs, ban corporate PACs, ban congressional stock trading, and tax billionaires so we can fix this broken, corrupt political system.”
Currently, Talarico is beating Paxton by 3.1 percentage points, according to the latest RealClearPolitics polling average.
Reps for Lone Star Rising PAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
