US Rep. Ashley Hinson, the Republican nominee in Iowa’s US Senate race, accepted nearly $90,000 in campaign contributions from billionaires named in the Jeffrey Epstein files, the Daily Beast first reported Thursday.
The Beast’s analysis of FEC donor documents were verified by Iowa Starting Line and show donors include Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, and Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan. None of the men have been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein’s crimes.
The timing matters. According to the Beast’s review, $30,500 of that money arrived during the months Hinson declined to sign the discharge petition filed by US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) to force a House vote on releasing the files. Schwarzman gave Hinson $7,000 on Sept. 10 — days after Massie filed the petition, per the report.
Hinson told The Gazette at the time that Massie was approaching the issue the wrong way and that the petition handed leverage to Democrats. The petition sat one signature short for roughly two months while House Speaker Mike Johnson delayed swearing in Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva, whose signature finally pushed it across the 218 threshold in November.
All four of Iowa’s Republican House members — Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn, and Randy Feenstra — declined to sign the petition. After its passage became inevitable, all four voted for the Epstein Files Transparency Act on Nov. 18.
Iowa Starting Line reached out to Hinson’s campaign with questions about the story. She did not return comment by press time.
Who the donors are
The Epstein files are the more than 3 million pages of records released by the Justice Department under the transparency act that name hundreds of people. Some appear incidentally. Others had documented, ongoing contact with Epstein after his 2008 guilty plea to soliciting prostitution from a minor.
Hinson’s donors span that range.
Lutnick, the highest-ranking administration official named in the files besides President Donald Trump, gave more than $12,000 to Hinson’s congressional campaigns in 2021 and 2023. Lutnick said for years he cut off contact with Epstein in 2005. But the files showed he visited Epstein’s private island in 2012 — a trip he admitted to in Senate testimony in February, saying he brought his wife and children. Lutnick also gave $5 million in April to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC backing House Republicans, weeks before his closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committee about his Epstein ties.
Rowan gave $7,000 to Hinson’s Senate campaign in September. An analysis by The Daily Pennsylvanian found Rowan stayed in contact with Epstein from 2013 to 2016—years after Epstein’s conviction—including emails about Epstein potentially buying Rowan’s private jet and plans to meet at Epstein’s Manhattan home. A Rowan spokesperson told the paper he had no business or personal relationship with Epstein and provided information only in connection with tax work for his Apollo co-founder Leon Black.
Schwarzman’s connection is thinner. He gave $26,500 to Hinson’s campaigns and PACs since 2021. His name appears in the files 23 times, including one email in which Epstein called him “terrific,” but the files contain no evidence the two men ever corresponded or interacted. The same is true of three other Hinson donors the Beast identified: Henry Kravis, John Catsimatidis, and Howard Lorber are men Epstein wrote about, not in correspondence with.
A pattern in Hinson’s donor rolls
This is not the first time Hinson’s fundraising has intersected with a sex trafficking case. In April, Iowa Starting Line reported that Hinson’s campaign and affiliated committees accepted $74,000 from John W. Childs, the private equity billionaire charged with solicitation of prostitution in a 2019 Florida investigation that authorities described as a $20 million human trafficking operation. The charges against Childs were dropped after a court threw out video evidence, and his record was expunged. Childs denied the allegations.
At least two Republican senators donated the contributions they received from Childs during his legal battle. Hinson did not.
There is precedent in this cycle for giving Epstein-linked money away, too. In Ohio’s Senate race, Sen. Jon Husted’s campaign says it donated all available funds it received from Epstein financial client Les Wexner to an anti-human-trafficking charity after Democrat Sherrod Brown spent nearly $1.5 million on ads about the donations.
Hinson did not respond when asked whether she planned to keep, donate or give back any of the contributions.
Why it matters in November
The revelations land in what polling shows is one of the closest Senate races in the country. A Fox News poll conducted in late June found Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek leading Hinson 50%-46%, within the margin of error, while a New York Times/Siena poll from the same month had Hinson up two. While Fox News rated the Iowa race a “toss-up” in July, election forecasters like Cook and Sabato’s Crystal Ball still view the race as “lean Republican.”
The same Fox poll found Iowans view Trump unfavorably by 13 points — a 19-point swing from November 2024. And the Epstein issue itself polls badly for Republicans: an October Reuters/Ipsos survey found Americans disapproved of the administration’s handling of the files 57% to 19%.
Iowa Democratic Party spokesperson Drew Myers told the Daily Beast that Hinson is on the side of what he called the “Epstein class,” accusing her of fighting harder to block the files’ release than for Iowans facing rising prices.
