Thames Valley Police said this month that they were looking into a claim that the former prince, while he was serving as U.K. trade envoy in 2010, had shared sensitive documents with Epstein.
An email in the latest U.S. release appears to show Mountbatten-Windsor forwarding Epstein a report from his special adviser about the then-prince’s visit to Southeast Asia.
Mountbatten-Windsor, who turned 66 on Thursday, has always denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. The king expressed his “deepest concern” at the news Thursday and stressed that “the law must take its course.”
The release of the Epstein files under a federal law signed by President Donald Trump was a significant departure from standard Justice Department protocols. The Justice Department does not usually release raw investigative materials en masse, and the handling of sensitive materials produced in discovery in the course of a trial is typically governed by court-imposed protective orders.
It would not be standard practice for the U.S. to share raw investigative files with a foreign entity without a formal request, just as it would not be Justice Department practice to release derogatory information about someone who was not charged with a crime.
Before the documents were publicly released, the Justice Department and the FBI said investigators “did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
“We found no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials,” according to the joint statement detailing their review of the documents.
But the release of millions of documents related to Epstein has had worldwide implications. In Norway, the economic crimes unit has opened a corruption investigation into former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland over his ties with Epstein. His lawyer said Jagland would cooperate with the probe, according to The Associated Press.
And Paris Public Prosecutor Laure Beccuau this week opened two new lines of inquiry, one into allegations of human trafficking and the other into possible financial wrongdoing related to Epstein.
The Justice Department has similar agreements with Norway and France, as well as many other countries. The Justice Department has not commented on whether those countries have reached out.
In 2020, federal prosecutors in New York formally requested through the British government to speak with Mountbatten-Windsor as part of the criminal investigation into Epstein’s history of abuse, NBC News reported at the time. He repeatedly refused to go in for testimony, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
Then-U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman called out Mountbatten-Windsor at a news conference, saying “he publicly offered, indeed in a press release, offered to cooperate with law enforcement investigating the crimes committed by Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators,” but, Berman later added, he had provided “zero cooperation.”
According to emails in the Epstein files, London’s Metropolitan Police sought help from an FBI agent in November who had been working out of London and who had done work related to Epstein in 2021. Another agent took over the job and said they would be happy to chat, according to the emails. It is not clear whether a conversation occurred.
Mountbatten-Windsor stepped back from active royal duties in 2019, and in 2022 he reached a legal settlement with Virginia Roberts Giuffre for an undisclosed amount after she filed a lawsuit in 2021 alleging that she was trafficked by Epstein and that the former prince sexually abused her when she was 17. He has denied having had sex with Giuffre.
