The British criminal investigation into Peter Mandelson has been effectively stalled by the refusal of Donald Trump’s justice department to release key Epstein-related evidence to Scotland Yard, a delay that now looks likely to push any charging decision out to 2028. The impasse, first reported by The Telegraph, has drawn fresh attention both to Washington’s handling of the Epstein archive and to the political sensitivities that continue to surround it on both sides of the Atlantic.
What American officials are refusing to do
At the heart of the dispute is a tranche of redacted material, held by the US Department of Justice, that British detectives believe may contain evidence relevant to their inquiry into the former business secretary and ex-ambassador to Washington. The Met has asked for voluntary disclosure; the DoJ has declined. Instead, American officials have told Scotland Yard that any transfer must proceed through a formal Mutual Legal Assistance request, the bilateral legal channel by which governments hand over evidence in cross-border cases.
Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, is understood to have pressed the point directly. Earlier in the year he raised the issue with Warren Stephens, the US ambassador in London, and in March he travelled to Washington in person to urge American officials to release the relevant material. Neither intervention moved the department from its position.
The practical consequence is significant. Mutual Legal Assistance applications are rarely quick; lawyers on both sides routinely scrutinise the legal basis for each request, and the process commonly takes 18 months or longer to complete. British prosecutors, meanwhile, will not open a file of evidence for a charging decision until they have physical originals of the documents in question — copies already circulating in the public domain are not enough. Taken together, those constraints make any prosecutorial decision before 2028 extremely unlikely.
What Scotland Yard is investigating
The Met’s inquiry was launched in January after documents published by the US DoJ appeared to show that Mandelson had passed sensitive government information to Jeffrey Epstein while serving in Gordon Brown’s cabinet. The leaked material is said to have included details of a multibillion-pound EU bailout, the timing and handling of Mr Brown’s resignation, and information about potential government sales of land and property to the late financier and convicted paedophile.
Mandelson was arrested on 23 February at his home in Regent’s Park on suspicion of misconduct in a public office. He was questioned for around nine hours and then released on bail. He denies any wrongdoing. A separate strand of the wider investigation has led to the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who also denies wrongdoing. Neither man has been charged.
Why the block matters politically
The sticking point is not Britain’s legal framework but Washington’s willingness to use it. Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche told CNN in February that, after investigators had reviewed the Epstein files last summer, “there was nothing in there that allowed us to prosecute anybody” — a position that has held despite calls from both Republicans and Democrats to pursue further charges. First Lady Melania Trump broke with that line on 10 April when she urged Congress, in a speech at the White House, to reveal the names of abusive men redacted from the files, declaring: “Epstein was not alone.”
The president himself has repeatedly asked for the subject to be dropped. “It’s really time for the country to get on to something else,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on 3 February, shortly after the latest tranche of files was released. Mr Trump was friends with Epstein for roughly 15 years but has long maintained that he severed the relationship before any of the criminal conduct occurred. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, a Republican congresswoman once closely aligned with the president and now among his sharpest critics, has suggested Mr Trump fears that, if prosecutions proceed, his friends “would get hurt”. The White House has dismissed her comments as “petty bitterness”.
That political backdrop is what gives the Mandelson delay its wider resonance. The DoJ’s refusal to cooperate informally with a close ally’s police investigation — on a matter touching a case as politically combustible as the Epstein files — has been read by critics as a decision about the files themselves as much as about any individual inquiry. The American holdings include a substantial body of redacted material still withheld to protect ongoing US investigations. Whether any of it relates to Mandelson is not publicly known; British detectives want to see it before they decide.
For now, the Met’s investigation continues on a much narrower evidential base than it had hoped to assemble. The Mandelson arrest has already transformed the politics of Sir Keir Starmer’s government, whose decision to appoint him to Washington has become one of the defining controversies of the administration’s first year. A stalled criminal inquiry running into its fourth year, with the relevant evidence locked in Washington, will not make that controversy any easier to contain.
