LONDON (AP) — British police on Tuesday are assessing whether former Labour Party politician Peter Mandelson should face a criminal investigation for leaking sensitive government information to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The U.K. government is seeking ways to kick Mandelson, a towering Labour figure for decades, out of Parliament and remove the noble title, Lord Mandelson, that comes with his lifetime membership in the House of Lords.
A trove of more than 3 million pages of Epstein-related documents released by the U.S. Justice Department has brought excruciating revelations about 72-year-old Mandelson, who served in senior government roles under previous Labour governments and was U.K. ambassador to Washington until he was fired in September over his ties to Epstein.
The newly released files contain new details about Mandelson's contacts with the disgraced financier, including emails passing on nuggets of political information, some of which critics say may have broken the the law. Police say they are reviewing reports of misconduct “to determine if they meet the criminal threshold for investigation.”
Among the revelations:
In 2003-2004, bank documents suggest Epstein sent three payments totaling $75,000 to accounts linked to Mandelson or his partner Reinaldo Avila da Silva. Mandelson has said that he doesn't remember receiving the money and will investigate whether the documents are authentic. But he resigned from the governing Labour Party on Sunday, saying he didn’t want to cause the party “further embarrassment.”
In 2008, Epstein avoided federal prosecution by pleading guilty to state charges in Florida of soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail.
Emails and text messages show that Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein continued after the financier’s sentence.
In 2009, Epstein sent da Silva 10,000 pounds (about $13,650 at today’s rates) to pay for an osteopathy course. Mandelson told The Times of London that “in retrospect, it was clearly a lapse in our collective judgment for Reinaldo to accept this offer.”
Also in 2009, Mandelson, then business secretary in the U.K. government, appears to have told Epstein he would lobby other members of the government to reduce a tax on bankers’ bonuses.
The same year, Mandelson sent Epstein an internal government report discussing ways the U.K. could raise money after the 2008 global financial crisis, including by selling off government assets. Mandelson wrote: “Interesting note that’s gone to the PM.”
In 2010, Mandelson messaged Epstein that “sources tell me 500 b euro bailout” is almost complete. The message was dated the day European governments announced a 500 billion euro deal to shore up the single currency.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has ordered the civil service to conduct an “urgent” review of all of Mandelson’s contacts with Epstein while he was in government.
Harriet Harman, a former lawmaker who served in government with Mandelson, said that she had long thought him untrustworthy, but was “shocked at the degree of wrongdoing.”
“I could never have believed that, (former Prime Minister) Gordon Brown having appointed him to the Cabinet, that he would sit in that Cabinet and leak information whilst the government was struggling to protect the country from the global financial crisis,” she said.
Epstein died by suicide in a jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on U.S. federal charges accusing him of sexually abusing dozens of girls.
An email requesting comment on the documents was sent to Mandelson through the House of Lords.
British Ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson speaks during the rededication ceremony of the George Washington Statue in the National Gallery in London, Wednesday, June 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran's president said Tuesday he instructed the country’s foreign minister to “pursue fair and equitable negotiations” with the United States, the first clear sign from Tehran it wants to try to negotiate as tensions remain high with Washington after the Mideast country's bloody crackdown on nationwide protests last month.
The announcement marked a major turn for reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian, who broadly had warned Iranians for weeks that the turmoil in his country had gone beyond his control. It also signals that the president received support from Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for talks that the 86-year-old cleric previously had dismissed.
Turkey had been working behind the scenes to make the talks happen there later this week as U.S. Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff is traveling in the region. Foreign ministers from Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have also been invited to attend the talks, if they happen, according to a regional official who spoke on condition of anonymity as they did not have permission to speak to journalists.
But whether Iran and the U.S. can reach an agreement remains to be seen, particularly as President Donald Trump now has included Iran's nuclear program in a list of demands from Tehran in any talks. Trump ordered the bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites during the 12-day war Israel launched against Iran in June.
Writing on X, Pezeshkian said in English and Farsi that the decision came after “requests from friendly governments in the region to respond to the proposal by the President of the United States for negotiations.”
“I have instructed my Minister of Foreign Affairs, provided that a suitable environment exists — one free from threats and unreasonable expectations — to pursue fair and equitable negotiations, guided by the principles of dignity, prudence, and expediency,” he said.
The U.S. has yet to acknowledge the talks will take place. A semiofficial news agency in Iran on Monday reported — then later deleted without explanation — that Pezeshkian had issued such an order to Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who held multiple rounds of talks with Witkoff before the 12-day war.
Late Monday, the pan-Arab satellite channel Al Mayadeen, which is politically allied with the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, aired an interview with Ali Shamkhani, a top Khamenei adviser on security.
Shamkhani, who now sits on the country’s Supreme National Security Council and who in the 1980s led Iran's navy, wore a naval uniform as he spoke.
He suggested if the talks happened, they would be indirect at the beginning, then moving to direct talks if a deal appeared to be attainable. Direct talks with the U.S. long have been a highly charged political issue within Iran's theocracy, with reformists like Pezeshkian pushing for them and hard-liners dismissing them.
The talks would solely focus on nuclear issues, he added.
Asked about whether Russia could take Iran's enriched uranium like it did in Tehran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, Shamkhani dismissed the idea, saying there was “no reason” to do so. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Monday said Russia had “long offered these services as a possible option that would alleviate certain irritants for a number of countries.”
“Iran does not seek nuclear weapons, will not seek a nuclear weapon and will never stockpile nuclear weapons, but the other side must pay a price in return for this," he said.
Iran had been enriching uranium up to 60% purity, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels. The International Atomic Energy Agency had said Iran was the only country in the world to enrich to that level that wasn't armed with the bomb.
Iran has been refusing requests by the IAEA to inspect the sites bombed in the June war.
“The quantity of enriched uranium remains unknown, because part of the stockpile is under rubble, and there is no initiative yet to extract it, as it is extremely dangerous," Shamkhani said.
Witkoff is expected to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli security officials on Tuesday, according to a White House official who was not authorized to comment publicly about the talks and spoke on condition of anonymity.
While in Israel, Witkoff will meet with the head of the Mossad intelligence service and the Israeli military's chief of staff, according to another official who was not authorized to speak to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Israel is expected to ask that any agreement with Iran include removing enriched uranium from the country, stopping the enrichment of uranium, limiting the creation of ballistic missiles and ending support for Tehran's proxies.
However, Shakhani in his interview rejected giving up uranium enrichment — a major obstacle in earlier talks with the U.S. In November, Araghchi said Iran was doing no enrichment in the country because of the U.S. bombing of the nuclear sites.
Witkoff later will travel to Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital, later in the week for Russia-Ukraine talks, the official said.
“We have talks going on with Iran, we’ll see how it all works out,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. Asked what his threshold was for military action against Iran, he declined to elaborate.
“I’d like to see a deal negotiated,” Trump said. “Right now, we’re talking to them, we’re talking to Iran, and if we could work something out, that’d be great. And if we can’t, probably bad things would happen.”
Mike Pompeo, a hard-liner on Iran who served as CIA director and secretary of state in Trump's first term, said it was “unimaginable that there can be a deal.”
“I think they may come away with some set of understandings,” Pompeo said at Dubai's World Governments Summit. "But to think that there’s a long-term solution that actually provides stability and peace to this region while the ayatollah is still in power is something I pray for but find unimaginable.”
Also Tuesday, a ship transiting through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf, reported being hailed on the radio “by numerous small armed vessels,” the British military's United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said.
The vessel continued into the Persian Gulf. The position of the incident appeared to be in Iranian territorial waters, where officials had warned of a naval drill by the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in recent days.
Associated Press writers Melanie Lidman in Jerusalem, Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, and Aamer Madhani, Matthew Lee and Konstantin Toropin in Washington contributed to this report.
FILE - Masoud Pezeshkian, the President of Iran, attends the United Nations General Assembly at United Nations headquarters, on Sept. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis, File)
