By Ahmed Aboulenein
WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (Reuters) – Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s administrator of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, emailed an invitation to a Valentine’s Day party in 2016 to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, U.S. Justice Department documents show.
The Justice Department has released millions of Epstein-related files over the past few weeks to comply with an act of Congress passed on a bipartisan basis. The files have revealed new details of Epstein’s ties to prominent people in politics, finance, business and academia.
Oz, formerly a celebrity physician on TV, sent the invite almost a decade after Epstein’s first sex crime charges became public in July 2006. The financier died by suicide in 2019, awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The email, dated February 1, 2016, and addressed from Oz and his wife to Epstein, has a subject line reading “Mehmet and Liza Oz’s Valentine’s Day Celebration” and contains a link to a digital invite.
He is not accused of any wrongdoing in relation to the Epstein scandal.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.
Oz appears several more times in the files, including an email sent from an account under his name to Epstein on January 1, 2016, that has the subject line “Dr oz.” The body of the message is completely redacted.
Dean Ornish, founder of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute, invited Epstein to an event he organized in 2014 that featured Oz as a speaker, but it appears Epstein was unable to attend.
Oz’s name also appears in a list of people described as “updated yes list for tomorrow evening” in a 2012 email from an unknown woman with the subject line “Sunday, Dec. 9th Les Mis.”
Oz, 65, gained national prominence as a cardiothoracic surgeon and television personality, hosting “The Dr. Oz Show” for over a decade, where he dispensed medical advice.
(Reporting by Ahmed AbouleneinEditing by Rod Nickel)
