Crime

The Department of Justice on Friday released the largest batch of Jeffrey Epstein files to date, a giant tranche including three million more pages of documents and thousands of videos and images.

The documents shed new light on the disgraced financier’s relationships with several prominent figures, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. They also contain a significant number of uncorroborated tips to law enforcement.

Congress mandated the release in November, and President Trump signed the bill despite initially opposing it, as he has sought to put an end to the accusations and speculation swirling around the case. The latest batch of documents arrived weeks after a Dec. 19 deadline imposed by Congress.

Ghislaine Maxwell has claimed that 29 friends of Jeffrey Epstein were shielded through ‘secret settlements’ by the Justice Department.

The disgraced socialite filed a habeas corpus petition on December 17 seeking to overturn her conviction, arguing that prosecutors cut deals with Epstein associates while prosecuting her as if no such agreements existed.

Maxwell alleges that 25 men reached undisclosed deals, while four alleged co-conspirators were known to investigators but never charged. She does not name any of the individuals.

Ryan Wedding, the Canadian former Olympic snowboarder accused of cocaine distribution and orchestrating several murders, appeared on Monday in a southern California courtroom for arraignment.

The 44-year-old has been charged with drug trafficking, conspiracy to murder, witness tampering and money laundering, among other charges. Authorities allege that after his snowboarding career, Wedding “turned to a life of crime” as a narcotics trafficker and led an organization that moved cocaine from South America to the US and Canada.

Before Ryan Wedding was arrested last week as one of the FBI’s Top 10 most wanted fugitives, and before he was charged a decade earlier for masterminding a plot to sail thousands of kilos of cocaine up from the Caribbean to Canada’s East Coast, Canadian police viewed the former Olympic snowboarder as one of the many middling profiteers in Metro Vancouver’s massive underground cannabis trade.

It was 2006, and Mounties, acting on an anonymous tip given to the Vancouver police, raided a farm in the eastern suburb of Maple Ridge. There they found thousands of pot plants and dozens of kilograms of dried flower, worth roughly $10-million at the time.

As an alleged cocaine kingpin on the run, Ryan Wedding is accused of ordering the murders of rival drug traffickers and an FBI witness who he considered a “rat.”

He’s even said to have placed a $5 million US bounty on the informant’s head.

After all that, could Wedding now be the one to spill what he knows about the cartels?

More … Ryan Wedding arrested: The full story of the arrest of the ex-Olympian turned international drug lord
h/t Canuknucklehead™

Last week, Becky Hamber told her murder trial that text messages were the only times she and her wife spoke about the two brothers they were seeking to adopt in such offensive terms as “idiot,” “dumbass,” and “it” — but that she never spoke that way to the boys’ faces.

On Thursday, she conceded that this wasn’t always the case.

…Wedding’s apparent capture brings to an end a search that began in 2015, when the RCMP sought to arrest him on cocaine trafficking charges after the Mounties’ large-scale Operation Harrington investigation into drug imports to Canada.

Ghislaine Maxwell is set to testify before Congress over her role in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring.

Maxwell, who is in a Texas prison camp serving a 20-year sentence, is expected to appear virtually before the House oversight committee on February 9.