LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, a former associate of Jeffrey Epstein, has personally bankrolled at least $11.5 million into a super PAC supporting Democrat James Talarico’s bid for the US Senate seat in Texas — even as Talarico campaigns on banning the very kind of organization funding him.
Federal Election Commission filings show Hoffman cut a $10 million check to Lone Star Rising PAC in June, months after Talarico defeated Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) in a contentious primary. Lone Star Rising spent nearly $4.5 million attacking Crockett before that March primary and is now turning its spending against Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton, Talarico’s general election opponent.
Talarico, 37, is trying to become the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Texas since 1988. He has made Paxton’s handling of a Waco sexual abuse case a centerpiece of his campaign, repeatedly calling it an “Epstein-style sweetheart deal.” The case involved Waco lawyer Adam Dean Hoffman, who was initially charged with felony sexual abuse of a young child. After a mistrial and the alleged victim’s refusal to testify again, prosecutors let him plead guilty to misdemeanor indecent assault and displaying harmful material to a minor. He served 29 days of a 60-day sentence and was not required to register as a sex offender.
“The Epstein Class has no place in Texas,” Talarico has said, and he has demanded Paxton’s office “Release the Hoffman Files,” echoing calls for the Justice Department to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in a Manhattan federal lockup in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Hoffman’s own Epstein ties
Reid Hoffman appears repeatedly in the Epstein files, describing visits to Epstein’s private Caribbean island, his Manhattan penthouse and his New Mexico ranch. In a September 2014 email, Hoffman wrote to Epstein: “Jeffrey has exquisite taste in people (myself excepted),” after Epstein connected him with Hardeep Singh Puri, then India’s UN ambassador and now the country’s oil minister.
On Christmas Eve 2014, Hoffman told Epstein he had mailed gifts including a surfer statue for Epstein’s Little St. James Island and ice cream “either for yourself or for ‘the girls.'” In August 2015, Epstein told others he’d had a “wild” dinner with Hoffman alongside tech figures Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Several of these documented interactions occurred after 2008, when Epstein was forced to register as a sex offender following a guilty plea to soliciting a minor for sex in Palm Beach, Florida. Hoffman said in a February statement that his only purpose in engaging with Epstein was fundraising for MIT, writing on X at the time: “The victims of Epstein’s abhorrent and vile actions deserve all the information they are seeking, and I continue to call on President Trump to deliver that for them.”
Hoffman also acknowledged in that statement that he had previously given inaccurate information about the timeline of his dealings with Epstein, writing that he told Axios in 2019 his last meeting with Epstein was in 2015 but had since found calendar entries showing “additional fundraising” contacts.
A representative for Hoffman has said the “the girls” reference in the Christmas Eve email referred to adult members of Epstein’s staff who called themselves that. No explanation has been given for what made the 2015 dinner “wild.”
Other emails show Hoffman was aware of Epstein’s 2008 jail time in Florida. In a July 2013 message to Joi Ito, then director of MIT’s Media Lab, Epstein asked: “[D]id reid follow up on the jail – answer surprise.” Ito replied: “I talked to him about it and he got it. He doesn’t judge people.”
The campaign responds
Talarico spokesman JT Ennis told the New York Post the campaign has no say over super PAC spending. “Our campaign has no control over contributions to any super PAC — federal law prohibits coordination between political campaigns and outside entities,” Ennis said. “The only way to get Big Money out of our politics is to reject politicians like Ken Paxton who want corporations and billionaires to decide our elections, not Texans. While Ken Paxton works to enrich himself and his donors, James will remain the only candidate in this race fighting to ban super PACs, ban corporate PACs, ban congressional stock trading, and tax billionaires so we can fix this broken, corrupt political system.”
The Texas Senate race is shaping up to be one of the costliest of the midterm cycle. Talarico currently leads Paxton by 3.1 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Representatives for Lone Star Rising PAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
