In June 2022, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) was looking for answers about the suspiciously lucrative relationship between former Apollo Global Management chairman and CEO Leon Black and convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Controversy over Black's Epstein ties led him to step down from his leadership role in the private equity giant in March 2021. He maintained he knew nothing of Epstein's criminal activity and that Epstein never did business with Apollo. But Black still held millions of shares in the company.

His departure from the C suite and letterhead, coupled with a company-commissioned investigation of his association with Epstein by the Dechert law firm, surely helped Apollo win unanimous licensing approval by the Nevada Gaming Commission for its February 2022 acquisition of The Venetian Resort, The Palazzo and Venetian Expo Halls in Las Vegas.

Wyden proved harder to impress. As the Epstein scandal expanded and grew even darker, the senator sought answers to hard questions from Apollo CEO Marc Rowan that he enumerated in a lengthy letter. I came across that letter recently while wading through the Justice Department's Epstein files.

The letter provides a stinging reminder that, despite millions of files contained in what amounts to a mountainous document dump, dedicated public servants such as Wyden are still seeking straight answers and pertinent information in the investigation. And he continues an uphill fight against his Republican counterparts in the Senate for whom justice and transparency only appears to go so far.

It didn't make sense to Wyden that the multibillionaire Black would find Epstein's advice on tax and estate planning matters worth what is now estimated at $170 million.

Citing the company's own investigation, Wyden wrote that the amount Epstein was paid "appears to far exceed that paid by Black to his other professional advisors. The compensation scheme, which ranged between $23 million and $26 million for a number of years, appears to have far exceeded the median CEO pay for Fortune 500 CEOs, which Fortune calculated at $15.9 million for 2021."

He then pointed to another oddity:

"This amount also appears well in excess of the expected compensation for estate planning services — particularly in a case where Epstein's work was required to be vetted by other legal and accounting professionals, at times was viewed as not useful, and included instances of substantial misrepresentation of applicable tax laws." Far from a certified public accountant or tax attorney, Epstein was a college dropout.

Four years later, Wyden no longer chairs the finance committee. But as its ranking Democrat, he continues to press for answers to questions that are being stonewalled by the Republicans on the committee. His attempt to gain support for the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act is the latest example. The bill would compel the Treasury Department to produce pertinent documents, including bank records, for congressional investigators.

In other words, it would give them the tools they need to follow the money.

Back in 2022, Wyden called on Apollo to retain all documents associated with the company's commissioned investigation of the Black-Epstein ties and the facts that led to some of its conclusions regarding Epstein's "creative ideas" and how they might have "differed from those offered by licensed tax attorneys, certified public accountants or other professional advisors engaged by Black for his estate and family office."

If, as had been touted, Epstein's genius saved Black as much as $2 billion, it ought to be provable on paper, right?

If some skeptics find the magic tax calculation hard to believe, they might have really raised eyebrows over the discovery that not all of the compensation agreements between Black and Epstein were signed. "Please also describe any 'unsigned agreements' between Mr. Black and Mr. Epstein where Mr. Epstein was compensated for work related to trust and estate planning issues, tax issues, issues relating to artwork, Black's airplane, Black's yacht, and other similar matters," Wyden wrote.

One of the unsigned agreements pertained to $56.5 million in payments Black made to Epstein in five installments between 2013 and 2014. Wyden was curious about the documents associated with that transaction as well.

Although the company's investigative report claimed Epstein provided Black with a "proprietary" solution to his complex tax challenges, Wyden sought the backup material and wondered whether Black had amended his tax returns to reflect the unique strategy that was saving him so much money.

After reading Wyden's devastating letter, and in the wake of recent Republican efforts to block the release of tax and financial information that would shed an honest light on the Black-Epstein relationship, I reached out to the senator's office for more perspective and received this statement from him.

"I've been investigating Leon Black's financial ties with Epstein for nearly four years during which a lot of disturbing information about their relationship has come to light, and Black continues to stick with his unconvincing story that he paid Epstein $170 million for tax and estate planning advice that Epstein really wasn't qualified to give in the first place," Wyden wrote. "It's deeply frustrating to have the Trump administration and Senate Republicans throwing up roadblocks, but my investigation of Epstein's financial network is going to continue.

"Epstein's victims deserve justice and transparency, and the American people are not going to accept living in a country where there are people whose wealth and power allows them to get away with horrifying sexual abuse and pedophilia."

For the sake of our country, I hope Wyden is right.

John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family's Nevada roots go back to 1865. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Reader's Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.