BREAKING: Top Republican EXPOSED for Taking THOUSANDS From Epstein Billionaires
For months, Ashley Hinson insisted that forcing a vote on releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files was the wrong move at the wrong time. What she didn’t say publicly was that billionaires named in those same files were cutting her campaign checks the entire time she was blocking it.
U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, the Republican nominee in Iowa’s closely watched Senate race, accepted nearly $90,000 in campaign contributions from billionaires who appear in the Jeffrey Epstein files. The finding, first reported by the Daily Beast and independently verified by Iowa Starting Line through a review of FEC donor records, includes contributions from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, and Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan. All three of the men have connections with Jeffrey Epstein.
The Timing Nobody in Hinson’s Campaign Wants to Talk About
Of that nearly $90,000, roughly $30,500 arrived during the exact window when Hinson was declining to sign the discharge petition filed by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the mechanism that would eventually force a House vote on releasing the Epstein files. Schwarzman personally cut Hinson a $7,000 check on September 10, just days after Massie’s petition hit the floor.
At the time, Hinson told The Gazette that Massie was going about it the wrong way, framing the petition as a gift to Democrats rather than a genuine push for transparency. That petition sat exactly one signature short of the 218 needed for nearly two months, a gap that closed only after House Speaker Mike Johnson delayed swearing in Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva. The moment she was finally seated, her signature pushed the petition over the line in November.
Hinson wasn’t alone. All four of Iowa’s Republican House members, Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn, and Randy Feenstra, declined to sign the petition while it needed their support. Once its passage became unstoppable anyway, all four turned around and voted for the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November 18, a vote that cost them nothing once the outcome was already decided.
Iowa Starting Line reached out to Hinson’s campaign for comment on the donations and the timing. As of publication, she has not responded.
Who These Donors Actually Are
The Epstein files span more than 3 million pages, released by the Justice Department under the transparency act, and they name hundreds of individuals. For many, the mention is incidental. For others, the paper trail shows documented, ongoing contact with Epstein that continued well after his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting prostitution from a minor.
Hinson’s donor list includes both kinds.
Lutnick is the highest-ranking Trump administration official named in the files besides the president himself. He gave more than $12,000 to Hinson’s congressional campaigns across 2021 and 2023. For years, Lutnick maintained he’d cut off contact with Epstein back in 2005. But the files tell a different story: they show he visited Epstein’s private island in 2012, a trip Lutnick was forced to acknowledge under Senate testimony in February, where he claimed he’d brought his wife and children along. He also funneled $5 million in April to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the primary super PAC bankrolling House Republicans, just weeks before sitting for closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committee about his Epstein ties.
Rowan gave $7,000 to Hinson’s Senate campaign in September. According to an analysis by The Daily Pennsylvanian, Rowan remained in contact with Epstein from 2013 through 2016, years after Epstein’s criminal conviction, in emails that discussed Epstein potentially buying Rowan’s private jet and plans to meet at Epstein’s Manhattan home. A spokesperson for Rowan told the paper he had no business or personal relationship with Epstein, and that any information exchanged was strictly tied to tax matters involving Apollo co-founder Leon Black.
Schwarzman’s connection is just slightly more obscured. He’s given Hinson’s campaigns and PACs $26,500 since 2021, and his name surfaces 23 times across the files, including one email in which Epstein calls him “terrific.” But so far the evidence is strictly limited to his mentions in the files. The same holds for three additional Hinson donors identified by the Beast: Henry Kravis, John Catsimatidis, and Howard Lorber.
Not the First Time Hinson’s Money Has Crossed Paths With a Trafficking Case
This isn’t a one-off pattern for Hinson’s fundraising operation.
Back in April, Iowa Starting Line reported that Hinson’s campaign and its affiliated committees had accepted $74,000 from John W. Childs, the private equity billionaire charged with solicitation of prostitution in a 2019 Florida investigation that authorities described at the time as a $20 million human trafficking operation. The charges against Childs were ultimately dropped after a court threw out key video evidence, and his record was later expunged. Childs has consistently denied the allegations.
Notably, at least two Republican senators who’d taken money from Childs chose to give those contributions away while his case was still active. Hinson did not.
There is a clear precedent this election cycle for candidates distancing themselves from Epstein-linked money. In Ohio’s Senate race, Sen. Jon Husted’s campaign says it donated every dollar it had received from Epstein financial client Les Wexner to an anti-human-trafficking charity, a move that came only after Democrat Sherrod Brown spent nearly $1.5 million on ads highlighting the connection.
Hinson has not said whether she intends to keep, donate, or return any of the contributions tied to donors named in the Epstein files.
A Race That Couldn’t Be Closer
This story lands in the middle of one of the tightest Senate contests in the country, at a moment when the timing could not be worse for Hinson.
A Fox News poll conducted in late June found Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek leading Hinson 50 percent to 46 percent, a gap within the margin of error. A New York Times/Siena poll from the same month found the opposite, with Hinson ahead by two points. Fox News itself rated the race a “toss-up” in July, while election forecasters at the Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball still classify it as “lean Republican,” a label that grows shakier with every new story like this one.
The same Fox poll found that Iowans now view Trump unfavorably by 13 points, a stunning 19-point swing from where his numbers stood in November 2024. And the Epstein issue specifically is a political liability nationwide: an October Reuters/Ipsos survey found Americans disapprove of the administration’s handling of the Epstein files by a 57 to 19 margin, numbers that should worry any Republican candidate who spent months standing in the way of their release.
Iowa Democratic Party spokesperson Drew Myers didn’t mince words when he spoke to the Daily Beast, accusing Hinson of aligning herself with what he called the “Epstein class,” and arguing she has fought harder to keep the files sealed than she has fought for Iowans struggling with the cost of living.
The Bottom Line
Hinson spent months telling Iowans that a vote to release the Epstein files was politically motivated and poorly timed. What voters didn’t know until now is that nearly $90,000 of her campaign’s money came from men named inside those same files, with a third of it landing directly during the period she spent blocking the vote. This plainly appears to be a conflict of interest rather than a coincidence. In regards to which one it actually is, Hinson’s campaign has so far declined to answer.