Newly released Justice Department records show Jeffrey Epstein tried to lure then–New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to his private Caribbean island in October 2014, dangling a helicopter pickup for Cuomo and real estate executive Andrew Farkas. In the texts, Epstein invited Cuomo to “come visit island,” and Farkas replied, “If there’s time and he’s game, we absolutely will,” while Epstein offered to “send heli for you” to San Juan. Cuomo’s office says the former governor never went and that he did not know Epstein. The exchange lands in a massive federal document dump that has already named a long list of political, financial and academic power players.
Short Text Thread, Big Questions
The messages appear in the Department of Justice’s public Epstein Library and are also detailed in coverage by the Times Union. According to the thread, Farkas told Epstein he and Cuomo were headed to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic when Epstein chimed in with “Come visit island” and the offer to send a helicopter from San Juan. After that, the texts go quiet on the subject. There is no follow-up in the messages indicating the trip happened, and the brief exchange now sits among millions of pages released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Cuomo Camp Tries To Draw A Bright Line
Cuomo’s team is pushing back hard on any suggestion of a relationship. In a statement to the Times Union, spokesman Richard Azzopardi said, “Gov. Cuomo did not know Jeffrey Epstein — period, full stop.” The exchange dates to Oct. 16, 2014, while Cuomo was on a Caribbean campaign swing during his re-election bid. He would later resign in August 2021 after a state investigation concluded he had sexually harassed multiple women. The newly public texts do not allege misconduct by Cuomo and contain no evidence that he accepted Epstein’s invitation or ever traveled to the islands.
Farkas’s Long, Regretted Ties To Epstein
The messages also highlight how close Epstein was to Farkas, a longtime Cuomo ally. Released files and prior reporting show the two men co‑owned a marina in the U.S. Virgin Islands and exchanged thousands of messages over more than a decade, including roughly 2,000 emails, according to the Harvard Crimson. Farkas has said he “deeply regret[s] ever having met” Epstein and has not been accused of any criminal conduct. Their correspondence is part of a broader trove that has prompted universities, corporations and reporters to revisit how far Epstein’s network reached.
Why These Files Keep Making News
Federal officials say they have posted more than 3 million pages of records, along with thousands of images and videos, in a public release ordered under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, according to the Department of Justice and ongoing coverage by CBS News. Officials say they have applied redactions to protect victims, but the sheer volume means new names and snippets of conversation keep surfacing, often stripped of context until journalists and institutions piece them together. The Cuomo invite is one of those fragments, a bit of social outreach that suddenly looks a lot more loaded because of who was doing the inviting and what else is in the archive.
So far, there is no publicly available evidence in the released files that Cuomo ever traveled to Epstein’s private islands, and prosecutors have not alleged any Epstein-related wrongdoing by the former governor. Instead, the texts serve as one more example of how Epstein courted access to prominent figures and how the ongoing document releases continue to reshape the public record around those connections, one awkward message thread at a time.
