In a September 2014 email, Reid Hoffman wrote to Jeffrey Epstein: "Jeffrey has exquisite taste in people."
He meant it as a compliment.
Hoffman — billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn — wasn't a casual acquaintance of Epstein's. He visited Little Saint James, Epstein's private Caribbean island. He stayed at Epstein's Upper East Side townhouse. He hosted dinner parties and invited Epstein. He exchanged gifts with him. He advised him on matters including foreign officials and luxury purchases. Their documented contact continued through 2018 — three years after Hoffman initially claimed their last meeting was 2015. When Bloomberg reviewed the records, its conclusion was that Hoffman had a "longer and more personal relationship" with Epstein than he had characterized. Aka Hoffman lied.
Hoffman eventually acknowledged as much: "By agreeing to participate in any fundraising activity where Epstein was present, I helped to repair his reputation and perpetuate injustice."
This is the man who has written $11.5 million in checks to elect Democrat candidate James Talarico to the United States Senate.
Talarico, the Texas Democrat challenging Attorney General Ken Paxton, has built his entire campaign identity around one idea. "The Epstein class has no place in Texas," he says. He's also run ads declaring that "the only minority destroying America is the billionaires." His biggest donor has an Epstein connection and a ten-figure net worth.
The $11.5 million went to a super PAC called Lone Star Rising — $10 million of it in June alone, roughly 80 percent of the PAC's entire second-quarter haul. The donations were first reported by the Texas Tribune.
Talarico isn't alone. Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff has taken massive amounts of money from Hoffman as well while touting anti-Epstein rhetoric. Ossoff told an Atlanta crowd: "This is the Epstein class ruling our country. They are the elites they pretend to hate." He took his anti-Epstein message to the Stephen Colbert show, where he invoked the "Epstein saga" as proof of Republican corruption. In September 2025, he complained about "vast sums of corporate and billionaire money in our political system." Then he accepted the maximum legal donation of $7,000 from a man Bloomberg determined had a "longer and more personal" relationship with Epstein than he admitted.
Talarico's spokesperson offered the standard exit: "Our campaign has no control over contributions to any super PAC." Nobody forced Talarico to build his Senate identity around attacking Epstein connections. He chose that lane — the lane now funded by a man who wrote Epstein personal emails, stayed in his townhouse, and visited his island.
The "Note to self: Google before going" line — Hoffman's attempt to frame his island visit as an innocent mistake — doesn't hold up against what came after. His last documented meeting with Epstein wasn't 2013 at MIT. It wasn't the 2014 island visit. It wasn't even the 2015 dinner with the tech titans. It was 2018. He was still meeting with a convicted sex offender in 2018, ten years after Epstein had been convicted of soliciting a minor for sex. And the explanation is that he didn't Google well enough before his first trip four years earlier.
Democrats demanding Epstein transparency, making Republican donors answer for every connection, have been conspicuously quiet about their own largest donor's documented history with the man. That's not an oversight. When your campaign slogan is "the Epstein class has no place in Texas" and your PAC's biggest check comes from someone who emailed Epstein compliments and stayed in his house, silence is a strategy.
Ossoff and Talarico had a choice. They could have returned the money, made a statement, and held the moral high ground they claim every time a camera is on.
They kept the money.
That's not hypocrisy caught in hindsight. That's a business decision made with full knowledge of who's writing the checks.