Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico has a super PAC called Lone Star Rising. It just received $11.5 million from Reid Hoffman — the LinkedIn billionaire who admitted to visiting Jeffrey Epstein's private Caribbean island, spending the night at Epstein's Manhattan townhouse, and visiting his New Mexico ranch. Hoffman's first documented meeting with Epstein was July 19, 2013.
Talarico once declared that "The Epstein Class has no place in Texas." Eleven and a half million dollars later, apparently it does.
He's not alone. Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff — who famously proclaimed that "MAGA is the Epstein class, ruling our country" — accepted $7,000 from Hoffman, the maximum legal individual contribution, according to Just the News. Both men built entire messaging campaigns around the idea that Republicans were somehow tainted by proximity to Epstein. Then both men took money from a guy who slept in Epstein's house.
Hoffman himself acknowledged the relationship in an interview with Axios, saying, "by agreeing to participate in any fundraising activity where Epstein was present, I helped to repair his reputation and perpetuate injustice. For this, I am deeply regretful." That regret has not, apparently, stopped Democrats from accepting his money — or Hoffman from writing the checks.
Hoffman also bankrolled E. Jean Carroll's legal case against President Trump. Hoffman gave Carroll millions to sue the President. Carroll claimed that President Trump raped her in a department store fitting room in the '90's. Carroll has accused multiple other famous men of raping her including former CBS CEO Les Moonves who she said raped her in an elevator in the '90's.
The scale of Hoffman's political spending makes the individual donations look like rounding errors. He has made more than 1,650 contributions to Democratic candidates and committees totaling over $76 million. That includes $60,000 to the Democratic Party of Illinois — the state party chaired by allies of Senator Dick Durbin — and additional donations to the Rhode Island Democratic State Committee, home turf of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Both Durbin and Whitehouse were publicly accused by the DOJ in December 2025 of accepting Hoffman donations.
In February 2026, the Trump administration's DOJ released documents that deepened the picture. Assistant Attorney General Patrick Davis stated that the "evidence paints a clear picture that Reid Hoffman has established a dark-money empire." Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has pushed for further investigation.
This is a party that turned "Epstein" into a political weapon. They didn't just mention the name — they built attack ads around it, fundraised off it, used it to paint every Republican donor as suspect by association. The accusation was never really about Epstein. It was about leveraging public disgust to win elections.
That strategy works right up until someone pulls the FEC filings and finds $11.5 million from the guy who admitted he helped "repair" Epstein's reputation. At that point, the attack ad writes itself — just not the way they planned.
