There are two ways to be for transparency. One is to write letters demanding it. The other is to cast the vote that actually gets it.

Marsha Blackburn has done a great deal of the first. A new Senate report says that when she had the chance to do the second, she passed.

The report

On August 4, 2026, Senate Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden released "Looking the Other Way," the product of a four-year investigation into how Jeffrey Epstein moved his money.

Its finding is that JPMorganChase, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank saw suspicious Epstein transactions as far back as 2002 and, in most cases, did not alert the Treasury Department until after his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges. More than a dozen bankers knew.

"I said from the start that if you want to get to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein cover-up, you had to follow the money," Wyden said. "This report is a ready-made roadmap for prosecutors, investigators and members of Congress to finally start holding the Epstein class accountable."

Buried inside that report is a section about Tennessee's senior senator.

What the report says Blackburn did

Wyden says that from 2024 to 2025 he went to Blackburn's staff repeatedly, asking for her help as a Republican member of the Finance Committee to subpoena Epstein's bank records.

He went to her specifically, the report says, because Blackburn had long been an outspoken proponent of transparency on Epstein.

Her office declined.

In December, Wyden asked her to co-sponsor the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act — a bill that would require the Treasury Department to hand Epstein's financial records over to the committee. She didn't. The bill still has 10 sponsors, every one of them a Democrat.

The Senate Finance Committee is where the bank records live. Suspicious Activity Reports go to Treasury, and Treasury answers to Finance. A subpoena from that committee is the mechanism. It is not a symbolic gesture, and it is not something a senator can do by writing a letter to somebody else.

What she said publicly instead

Here is the part that is hard to square.

The following year, Blackburn posted on social media that her "efforts to crack the Epstein trafficking ring wide open have been stonewalled by Democrats at every turn."

That same day, she wrote to newly appointed FBI Director Kash Patel, calling it "paramount that the FBI provide full transparency to the American people and immediately release the complete, unredacted records in this case." She asked specifically for the flight logs from Epstein's plane and helicopter, the names of associates including Ghislaine Maxwell's "little black book," footage from Epstein's Florida home, and any other records related to the Epstein and Maxwell matters.

Also that same day, she wrote to the IRS, asking it to release materials revealing the names of everyone who had a financial relationship with Epstein or Maxwell.

So on a single day, Blackburn asked two federal agencies she does not control to release Epstein's financial records — and said Democrats were blocking her — while, according to Wyden, sitting on the one request from a Democrat that would have used her own committee's subpoena power to get bank records directly.

Neither her campaign nor her Senate office answered the Nashville Banner's questions about the report or the subpoenas.

The rest of her Epstein positioning

Blackburn is not a bystander on this issue. She is the Republican nominee for governor of Tennessee, and she has made punishment of sex offenders a centerpiece of that campaign.

Asked by the Banner whether she would continue executions as governor, she said yes — and went further:

"As governor, I will work to bring back the electric chair so that victims' families can get the closure they deserve. If you rape or molest our babies in Tennessee, you should get a death sentence."

That is a maximal position on punishing sex crimes. It sits next to a report saying she wouldn't sign a subpoena for the banks that processed a sex trafficker's money for seventeen years.

If she wins in November, Blackburn leaves the Senate in January — and with it, any role in the Epstein records fight. She has also told the Banner she'll stay in her Senate seat until she's sworn in as governor, which would let her appoint her own replacement.

This is the pattern, not the exception

Blackburn is not alone in this. The gap between what Republicans say about the Epstein files in public and what they do with the powers they hold has been the defining feature of this story.

James Comer chairs the House committee investigating the files. He spent two years subpoenaing the Bidens — then let Attorney General Pam Bondi sit for an interview that was neither sworn nor videotaped, stopped holding formal hearings, and said he wouldn't call JD Vance or Susie Wiles.

Tom Emmer, the House majority whip, promotes his committee's other investigations constantly and says nothing about its Epstein one — the one his own son runs.

And when the House finally voted on releasing the files, the tally was 427 to 1. That vote is what a real position looks like: it is recorded, and you can't take it back.

Blackburn's letters are recorded too. So, now, is what she did when a subpoena needed one Republican signature.

She has a straightforward way to answer this. She could say whether Wyden's account is accurate, and if it is, why she said no. As of publication, her office hasn't.

Source

Report alleges Blackburn refused to help with Epstein probe — Sarah Grace Taylor, Nashville Banner, August 13, 2026. Photo: Nashville Banner.