A bombshell report revealed Monday that under the first Trump administration, the FBI appeared to have issued a “stand down” order to New York Police Department investigators regarding their criminal probe into Jeffrey Epstein, an order that came just five days after the disgraced financier’s arrest in 2019.

The existence of the supposed directive was revealed by law professor and legal scholar Ryan Goodman, who found it buried within the Justice Department’s recent release of around 3.5 million files on Epstein.

“The directive applied to NYPD’s Special Victims Unit – the group specially trained and equipped to handle sex crimes and child abuse cases,” Goodman wrote in a report published Monday in Just Security, a non-partisan law and policy journal.