The Sledge Report obtains documents from senate.gov that anyone can obtain from senate.gov
What I’m about to share with you is the result of weeks of independent investigation into the Epstein files Blanche blocked from public release. I’ve been tracking this story since February, when CBS News broke it and I immediately recognized its significance because I have a trained eye for significance. Within 72 hours of reading the original reporting, I had independently confirmed its findings by reading the reporting a second time, more slowly, and taking screenshots. Four colors of string went up on the corkboard that night. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t need to.
Here’s what my investigation uncovered: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — who, and I cannot stress this enough, is Donald Trump’s former personal defense attorney — personally intervened to prevent the Drug Enforcement Administration from handing over an unredacted Epstein document to the United States Senate. I know this because Senator Ron Wyden wrote a public letter about it that anyone can read on a government website. But I found it independently.
What the Epstein Files Blanche Blocked Actually Contain
Let me walk you through the timeline, because timelines are what separate real investigators from people who just have opinions. I have both, but the timeline is the important part.
In the Epstein files released by the DOJ in January, CBS News investigators discovered a 69-page DEA memorandum from 2015 revealing that Epstein and fourteen other individuals were targets of a major drug enforcement operation called “Chain Reaction.” The investigation was run by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces — a Reagan-era unit designed to take down cartels, the Russian mafia, and international crime syndicates. According to law enforcement sources, the DEA had evidence of roughly $50 million in suspicious wire transfers tied to drug trafficking and prostitution in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New York City. They were targeting club drugs — ketamine, ecstasy, GHB. The kind of substances used to incapacitate victims.
I printed the entire 69 pages, highlighted them, taped them to the wall. My neighbor Gary asked what I was doing and I told him this was bigger than Watergate. Gary said that seemed like a lot and went back inside. Gary isn’t ready.
Now here’s where it gets interesting, and by “gets interesting” I mean where I repeat what historian Heather Cox Richardson laid out in her March 18th newsletter, which I discovered through my own independent research process of being subscribed to her Substack. Richardson — who, fine, is a legitimate historian, I’ll give her that — connected the dots between Wyden’s investigation and the broader pattern of obstruction. She does good work. Not as good as what I do, because she has institutional resources and I have a police scanner and three monitors, but good work nonetheless.
The Pattern My Investigation Revealed (By Reading About It)
On February 25, Senator Wyden wrote to DEA Administrator Terrance Cole requesting the unredacted document by March 13. According to Wyden, Cole was ready to hand it over. Then Blanche stepped in. The DEA started directing questions to the Deputy AG’s office. The document — which says “UNCLASSIFIED” at the top of every single page, and I can confirm this because I zoomed in on the screenshot — was suddenly off-limits to the United States Congress.
I want to be clear about what this means, because I’ve spent eleven days mapping it on my corkboard and the string pattern doesn’t lie. Trump’s former personal lawyer is now using his position as the second-highest official at the Department of Justice to prevent a senator from seeing an unclassified government document about Jeffrey Epstein’s drug trafficking operation. The same Todd Blanche who oversaw the DOJ’s review of whether it improperly withheld Epstein files mentioning Trump. The same Todd Blanche who arranged Ghislaine Maxwell’s transfer to a minimum-security facility. And the same DOJ that already got caught withholding FBI interview summaries from a woman who accused both Epstein and the President of abuse when she was a minor.
My sources — and when I say “my sources” I mean the Senate Finance Committee’s publicly available press releases — paint an even darker picture. Wyden’s investigation has already established that JPMorgan Chase failed to report over $1 billion in suspicious Epstein transactions. The bank retroactively filed suspicious activity reports covering nearly $1.3 billion in transactions after Epstein died, having flagged only $4.3 million while he was alive and actively trafficking women and girls. JPMorgan’s former CEO of Private Banking literally coached Epstein on how to structure cash withdrawals to avoid reporting requirements. Executives reporting directly to Jamie Dimon supervised the relationship.
Why the Trump Administration Dismantled the Unit That Investigated Epstein
And here’s the part that made me add a fifth color of string. The OCDETF task force — the elite unit that ran Operation Chain Reaction against Epstein — was officially dismantled by the Trump DOJ in November 2025. They shut down the very unit that had been investigating Epstein’s drug trafficking network. Senator Wyden’s Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act — which would force Treasury Secretary Bessent to hand over $1.5 billion worth of Epstein bank records he’s been sitting on — was blocked by Senate Republicans on March 3rd.
Let me say that again so you feel the weight of it, the way I felt it at 3 AM when I mapped this on the whiteboard under “FOLLOW THE MONEY,” which has been written there since I set up the operations center but now finally has arrows that lead somewhere. Epstein’s own survivors endorsed the bill. Their attorneys wrote to Congress begging for these records. And Republicans blocked it.
Now, historian Richardson did something clever in her newsletter that I want to highlight, because even mainstream historians occasionally produce findings consistent with my own independent analysis. She drew a direct parallel between Wyden’s letter to Blanche and Adam Schiff’s September 2019 letter to the Acting Director of National Intelligence — the one where Schiff accused the administration of illegally withholding a whistleblower complaint to protect the President. That whistleblower complaint turned out to be about Trump pressuring Ukraine’s Zelensky to dig up dirt on Biden. It led to Trump’s first impeachment.
And we all know how that ended. Schiff stood before the Senate and told Republican senators they couldn’t trust this president to do the right thing. That he was a man without character or ethical compass. Every single Republican senator except Mitt Romney voted to acquit on abuse of power. Every single one voted to acquit on obstruction. Ted Cruz, who privately told Trump’s legal team that zero out of 100 senators believed there was no quid pro quo, voted to acquit anyway. Lindsey Graham, who reportedly walked into the GOP cloakroom shouting that they were “F**KED,” voted to acquit anyway.
And here we are. The man they acquitted is now President again, and his personal attorney is blocking Epstein drug trafficking documents from reaching Congress.
What This Investigation Means
My ex-wife used to say I saw patterns that weren’t there. She said I spent too much time in the basement. She said the corkboard was “not a healthy coping mechanism.” She’s living in a condo in Dayton now with a man named Phil who sells flooring. Phil doesn’t have a corkboard. He doesn’t have 847 newsletter subscribers. The man probably doesn’t even know that the Trump administration dismantled the exact law enforcement unit that was investigating whether Jeffrey Epstein was pumping underage girls full of ketamine as part of a cross-border criminal conspiracy.
But I know. And now you know. Because I told you. After the senator told me. Which happened after the reporters told the senator. Who learned it after the documents told the reporters.
That’s called the chain of investigative custody, and in my twenty-two years as an insurance claims adjuster, I learned to respect the chain. You follow the paper. You follow the money. And you follow it until someone tells you to stop, and then you follow it harder, which is what I assume Senator Wyden is doing, and what I am also doing from a parallel but independent position in my basement in suburban Ohio.
I will continue to update my findings as they are reported by other people. The Sledge Report does not rest. DEVELOPING.
Rick Sledge is Newswax’s Independent Investigations Correspondent. His operations center has been at DEFCON 2 since January. The Sledge Report has 847 subscribers. His ex-wife has not read it. Previous Epstein coverage: EXPOSED: The Epstein Files Delay That Proves What I’ve Been Saying.
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