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The last time Mike Johnson, the speaker [sic] of the House, spoke to Democrats about ending the government shutdown was on October 8 — almost three full weeks ago. Since then, he has appeared many times on TV, lying so shamelessly, so egregiously, and so gleefully about his motives for grinding the legislature to a halt that you half expect the God he claims to worship to turn him into a bronze cast of a forked tongue.

One must be gullible’s-not-in-the-dictionary-level naïve, willfully ignorant, or actively stupid to believe that Johnson’s obdurate refusal to reconvene the House — with funding for SNAP benefits ending on Saturday! With American families preparing to starve! — is not related to the impending vote on the discharge petition to release the files related to the late child sex trafficker and so-called “financier” Jeffrey Epstein.

Let me put that more succinctly: At Donald Trump’s behest, Mike Johnson has shut down the entire House of Representatives, during a moment of national crisis, rather than risk allowing the Epstein documents to come out. 

Trump is so confident in his own political impenetrability that he’s reduced the East Wing of the White House to rubble — but the release of the Epstein files scares the shit out of him, so much so that he is considering granting a pardon to Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Words fail to describe how batshit this all is.

The day after that last meeting between Johnson and Senate Democrats, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), in his capacity as ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, sent letters to four of the nation’s largest banks requesting records related to more than $1.5 billion in suspicious financial transactions flagged by said banks and tied to sex trafficking crimes committed by Epstein and Maxwell.

The press release is instructive and worth reading carefully:

The letters to JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, and Bank of New York Mellon come after Judiciary Republicans blocked Democrats’ attempts to subpoena these records on September 17 during the Committee’s hearing with Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel. When JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon heard of the efforts to seek documents from his bank, he stated that he “regret[s] any association with that man at all,” and that “what happened to those women is terrible.” These letters seek to take Mr. Dimon up on his words of contrition and ensure that JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, and Bank of New York Mellon help Congress understand how Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and their co-conspirators were able to use their banks to operate their international sex trafficking ring.

Under the Bank Secrecy Act, financial institutions are required to file Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) within 60 days of detecting transactions that raise red flags. Yet, all four banks with close financial ties to Epstein repeatedly failed to take timely action for years, potentially allowing his criminal activity to remain undetected.

Raskin wrote in the letter to JPMorgan:

For over fifteen years, JPMorgan turned a blind eye to evidence of Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking. Senior executives at your bank helped Mr. Epstein open 134 accounts and processed over one billion dollars in transactions for Mr. Epstein, including after his 2008 conviction for soliciting minors. …

Financial institutions are often the first line of defense in detecting serious federal crimes, especially the ones that involve significant flows of money like sex trafficking. Flagging and detecting Mr. Epstein’s suspicious withdrawals may well have stopped his crimes years earlier and saved countless girls and women from a fateful interaction with the criminals Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and their co-conspirators. If you truly regret JPMorgan’s shameful association with Mr. Epstein, we trust that you will work with us to promptly produce these records and help us ensure that neither your bank nor any other American bank ever again enables and bankrolls a criminal sex trafficking ring like Epstein’s.

Most of the coverage on Epstein has focused on his monstrous child sex trafficking operation — and rightly so. It is because of the courage of survivors like Courtney Wild and the late Virginia Guiffre, whose memoir came out last week, that we know as much as we do about his criminal enterprise.

But the child sex trafficking operation could not have run without money — lots of money. During his shadowy career in “finance,” Epstein somehow accumulated a fortune. He owned properties in New York, Paris, Palm Beach, New Mexico, and the US Virgin Islands. He had a private jet. He had wealthy “clients” like Les Wexner and Leon Black shoveling dough at him.

And, as Raskin’s letter shows, Epstein processed over $1.5 billion in transactions his banks flagged as suspicious — including the withdrawal of vast sums of cash he used to pay off his victims. The numbers boggle the mind and hint at the scope and scale of the heinous enterprise.

Without the cooperation of his banks, this would not have been possible.

Of the four big banks, JPMorganChase is arguably the one with the most skin in the game. During his many years as a top executive with the firm, the disgraced banker James Edward “Jes” Staley, once the presumptive heir apparent to longtime CEO Jamie Dimon, developed what appears to be a close personal friendship with Epstein, which Epstein cultivated and manipulated to his advantage. This, I suspect, is why Dimon is singled out in Raskin’s press release.

In September, a month before Raskin’s letters went out, the veteran journalists David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg — who have been digging into Epstein’s finances for more than half a decade — published a lengthy investigative piece in The New York Times Magazine under the not-so-subtle title, “How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.” Raskin cites revelations in that article in his letter to Dimon, in which he requests JPMorgan to voluntarily turn over:

1. 1. All documents and information related to any transaction identified by JPMorgan for further review, inspection, or discussion relating to Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, or any of their minor victims, whether or not eventually flagged, raised, or provided to federal regulators in any fashion;

1. 2. All communications to or from Jes Staley, Mary Erdoes, and Justin Nelson related to Jeffrey Epstein;

1. 3. All documents and records related to decisions relating to Jeffrey Epstein’s account, including but not limited to any discussions, meetings, or decisions made regarding whether to maintain Mr. Epstein as a client or suspend or cease the banking relationship;

1. 4. All internal communications within JPMorgan and all affiliated institutions regarding Jeffrey Epstein, including but not limited to his investigation and conviction in 2008, potential institutional risk relating his banking relationship, or other compliance risks;

1. 5. All internal risk assessments and due diligence reports for all Jeffrey Epstein- or Ghislaine Maxwell-related accounts or transactions; and

1. 6. All communications with federal regulators or law enforcement agencies regarding Mr. Epstein or Ms. Maxwell from 1998 to present.

Unfortunately, because of the aforementioned pedophilia-simping by Johnson and the other House Republicans, Raskin was unable to subpoena these documents. All he can do is ask nicely and hope for the best; Dimon is at liberty to simply crumple up the letter and toss it in the trash.

While we wait for JPMorgan to produce the requested documents, or Johnson to reconvene the House, or Godot to show up, I thought it would be instructive to comb through the Times article and other in-depth pieces about Epstein’s finances. 

Here Are 12 Things the Banks Teach Us About Jeffrey Epstein:

1. Epstein knew almost everyone…

From the moment he set foot in the prestigious Dalton School, Jeffrey Epstein sought to develop and grow his social network. He was, as his buddy the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak called him, “a collector of people” — the more prominent, wealthy and influential, the better.

And Epstein was a starfucker ne plus ultra. No one has ever starfucked like this guy starfucked. He met, he beguiled, he ingratiated himself, and he name-dropped as rapid-fire as a rapper on a dis track.

Over the years, his network expanded. One of his collected friends would introduce him to another, or he would introduce them to each other, and so on to infinity. In time, Epstein became, through sheer force of will, a major cog in the worlds of finance, politics, fashion, science, and technology. He knew presidents, he knew princes, he knew prime ministers, he knew professors, he knew fashion photographers, he knew supermodels.

If his swollen Rolodex was useful for networking purposes, it also gave him cover. The prominent individuals in his “black book” trust-washed him. Before that first indictment, how many first-time guests, if invited by the mysterious and wealthy benefactor to a dinner party at his Upper East Side mansion — where, say, Bill Gates, David Copperfield, Woody Allen, and the Duke of York were also expected — would bother vetting the host?

This is how Epstein’s social empire grew. Each dropped name led to more names he could drop later, until so many prominent individuals were linked to him that his operation became, for too many years, like the big banks he patronized: too big to fail.

2. …and was generally well-liked.

In a recent interview, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, once Epstein’s next-door neighbor, told a story about how he was so creeped out the first time he met Jeffrey that he refused to go near him ever again. That reaction seems to be the exception rather than the rule. In general, people seemed genuinely to like him — which tracks; sociopaths are very charming.

One of the men who fell for his charms, hook line and sinker, was Jes Staley. The two first met in 1999, at the behest of then-JPMorgan CEO Sandy Warner — who now claims, per the Times, that he, too, always found Epstein creepy — after Staley became head of the firm’s private banking division. Epstein’s network would be useful for someone in that job to tap.

From there, they developed what Staley characterized as a “fairly close professional relationship,” but what appears to have been, if their email exchanges are any indication, a close friendship. As Kalyeena Makortoff writes in The Guardian, Staley turned to Epstein to help connect his daughter — a physics major — with scientists and senior professors at Ivy League universities. The financier, whom Staley referred to as “Uncle Jeffrey,” would later be invited to her graduation in 2015. Staley stressed that he did not then know of Epstein’s crimes.

[Staley’s former chief of staff] Wiggins told the court, “Mr. Staley said to me once: ‘Why would I have introduced my wife and daughters to Mr. Epstein if I thought he was a pedophile?’”

Put it this way: The two middle-aged men, just a few years apart in age, were tight enough that even after Epstein’s 2006 arrest — and 2008 conviction! — Staley took Epstein at his word when he said the “prostitute” he solicited was a legal adult, and stood by his friend. Were Epstein not so obviously monstrous, we might admire Staley’s loyalty.

As Makortoff notes, “When Epstein was released on house arrest in July 2009, Staley was one of the four people he emailed to say: ‘Free and home.’ Staley replied: ‘I toast your courage !!!!!’”

Five exclamation points is a lot of exclamation points!!!!!

(Also of note: Staley spent so much time at Epstein’s house that he wound up having an affair with one of his friend’s “employees.” To be clear, his paramour was not one of the trafficked girls — although the word employee is frustratingly vague, not least because a number of Epstein’s “employees” were named as unindicted co-conspirators in the 2008 non-prosecution agreement.)

By November of 2009, Staley had moved to a different role at JPMorgan, so Epstein was no longer his client. But the friendship — supposedly just a business relationship — endured. Makortoff writes:

In November 2009, Staley detoured from a work trip to visit Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico, replete with a 26,700 sq ft mansion, private airstrip, and seven-bay heated garage. He emailed Epstein in thanks: “So when all hell breaks lose [sic], and the world is crumbling, I will come here, and be at peace. Presently, I’m in the hot tub with a glass of white wine. This is an amazing place … I owe you much. And I deeply appreciate our friendship. I have few so profound.”

In December, months after Epstein’s release, the pair finally found time to meet in person:

I realize the danger in sending this email. But is [sic] was great to be able, today, to give you, in New York City, a long heartfelt hug. To my friend, Thanks. Jes.

As late as 2015, Staley gushed to Epstein via email: 

The strength of a Greek army was that its core held shoulder to shoulder, and would not flee or break, no matter the threat. That is us.

That’s one step away from using iambic pentameter to compare the guy to a summer’s day. You don’t write that to someone you don’t genuinely, sincerely like.

I’m picking on Staley here because he was the main conduit between Epstein and JPMorgan. But there were doubtless other men who had similar relationships with this depraved monster. Epstein knew how to lure them in and, if he wanted to keep them around, he knew how to keep them around. Remember: One of the reasons Melinda and Bill Gates got divorced was the latter’s relationship with Epstein.

3. Not everyone in his orbit, his “black book,” or the FBI files is a pedophile…

My sense is that some of the entries in the “black book” — and certainly a lot of the people he socialized with less frequently, whose names we don’t even know — were not aware of his abhorrent predilections. If these individuals are quiet now, it is not because they did anything wrong, but because they don’t want the world to know how badly they were played. No one likes to be made a fool of.

4. …but Epstein’s predilections were an open secret.

“Why would I have introduced my wife and daughters to Mr. Epstein if I thought he was a pedophile?” Staley asked his chief of staff. Was he in deep denial about the extent of his friend’s darker impulses?

Even so, the warning signs were there. He and Mary Erdoes, another JPMorgan executive, openly joked about Epstein’s preference for young women — even after his July 2006 arrest and indictment. As the Times reports:

That August [2006], Staley attended a Hamptons fundraiser and was struck by the crowd’s composition. “The ages between husbands and wives would have fit in well with Jeffrey,” he told Erdoes in an email. She replied that Epstein’s name had come up at an event the night before. An acquaintance noted how another prominent New York businessman liked to surround himself with beautiful assistants. “Lots of comparisons to JE,” Erdoes wrote, adding that people were “laughing about Jeffrey.”

5. Epstein was essential to JPMorgan’s business…

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the Times piece is that Epstein was one of JPMorgan’s most important customers. He deposited a lot of cash there, he steered rich clients to the firm, and he made the bank bank.

“His accounts,” the Times piece tells us, 

were brimming with more than $200 million. He generated millions of dollars in revenue for the bank, landing him atop an internal list of major money makers. He helped JPMorgan orchestrate an important acquisition. He introduced executives to men who would become lucrative clients, like the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and to global leaders, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He helped executives troubleshoot crises and strategize about global opportunities.

Later in the piece, we learn that:

The millions of dollars in fees that Epstein was paying the bank was only part of his allure. Arguably more important, he was identifying potential new clients and business opportunities. In 2003, for example, he introduced Staley to Brin, the co-founder of Google and one of the world’s richest men. Brin hired JPMorgan to help manage his immense fortune — he would eventually park more than $4 billion in assets at the bank — a decision that Staley credited to Epstein. Staley later said in a deposition that a parade of other Epstein referrals — including to Gates, Elon Musk, and Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, an Emirati billionaire — followed, though not all became clients.

JPMorgan is a massive, deep-pocketed company. Last year, the firm raked in $180.6 billion in revenue, with a net income of $58.5 billion — its best year ever, for the seventh consecutive year. There’s a reason why Dimon is such a successful and highly respected CEO.

And yet for all that wealth, all that revenue, and all that prestige, JPMorgan still considered Epstein to be indispensable to the operation — too valuable to eighty-six.

A number of times during his long relationship with the bank, executives considered severing ties with him. Each time, they decided against it. Profits trumped ethics.

6. …but not so essential that Jamie Dimon ever met with him.

Epstein, as we’ve seen, liked to collect people. He networked all the time. And he was really, really good at it. He brought in a lot of business for JPMorgan, so much so that it paid him millions. And Epstein facilitated the acquisition of a controlling stake in Highbridge Capital Management, a major hedge fund run by Glenn Dubin. (Dubin’s wife, the former Miss Sweden, Eva Andersson-Dubin, was one of Epstein’s ex-girlfriends; per the Times, Epstein was godfather to their daughter.) That deal cost JPMorgan $1.3 billion and earned Epstein $15 million in commissions.

Dimon, per the Times, has a reputation as a micromanager and control freak. His New York City residence is on the Upper East Side, near Central Park, a 20-minute walk from Epstein’s. The two men ran in the same circles. Jes Staley, Epstein’s pal, was Dimon’s direct report. Epstein, as we have seen, brought in big clients and facilitated huge deals for JPMorgan, including the monster deal with Highbridge.

And yet Dimon not only never met the guy, but claimed, in sworn deposition, not even “knowing anything about Jeffrey Epstein” until 2019, the year of his death.

This is sus, as the kids say. As the Times points out:

Dimon had several core traits as the leader of America’s biggest bank. One was his willingness to micromanage; a 2010 profile in this magazine mentioned that “Dimon seemingly meddles in every detail.” The tendency is hard to square with his insistence that he didn’t know Epstein was a client even as his subordinates battled about the propriety of working with him. (As David Boies, one of the lawyers representing Epstein’s victims, told us, either Dimon knew about Epstein and lied in a sworn deposition or his subordinates kept him in the dark. “Neither is good,” Boies said.)

7. Over the course of many years as a JPMorgan customer, Epstein withdrew a shit-ton of cash…

According to the Times, “JPMorgan ultimately processed more than $1 billion in such transactions” — that is, in cash withdrawals and suspicious wire transfers — for Epstein. (Just at the one bank! Not including the other three!)

It is a staggering, jaw-dropping amount of money. One billion is a thousand million. He could have paid a thousand girls $1 million each, or ten thousand girls $100,000 each. More likely, he paid thousands of girls far lesser sums, with the balance underwriting the vast trafficking operation.

In Rep. Raskin’s assessment, as quoted above:

Financial institutions are often the first line of defense in detecting serious federal crimes, especially the ones that involve significant flows of money like sex trafficking. Flagging and detecting Mr. Epstein’s suspicious withdrawals may well have stopped his crimes years earlier and saved countless girls and women from a fateful interaction with the criminals Mr. Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and their co-conspirators.

Yes, it may well have. But we’ll never know, because for years, JPMorgan chose to look the other way.

8. …and routed a lot of money to Eastern Europe.

This paragraph in the Times article is particularly damning:

Epstein remained a client [after his indictment and conviction] — “no change to relationship approach” was the final verdict — and even during his jail sentence, JPMorgan continued wiring money from his accounts to banks in Russia and Eastern Europe, where young women were being drawn into his sex trafficking network, according to sealed court records.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), in his own investigation into the Epstein money trail, discovered where a lot of this money was going. As Matthew Goldstein wrote for The New York Times in July:

The single largest suspicious activity report reviewed by the congressional team was filed in late 2019 by JPMorgan for $1.1 billion. The report covered 4,700 transactions dating to 2003, including payments to women from Belarus, Russia and Turkmenistan. Many of Mr. Epstein’s victims included young women from Eastern European countries.

The countries of Eastern Europe — and Russia and Belarus in particular — have been a hotbed of sex trafficking since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

9. The source of his wealth was mysterious — even to his bankers.

This nugget in the Times story suggests that not even the JPMorgan executives knew where Epstein’s vast fortune came from:

A 2003 internal report pegged his net worth at about $300 million. The report, which hasn’t previously been disclosed, noted that Epstein’s occupation was advising wealthy individuals like Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire operator of brands like Victoria’s Secret and the Limited, though bank documents at the time did not list any other clients. That year, JPMorgan attributed more than $8 million in fees to Epstein, making him the biggest revenue generator among investor clients in the private-banking division.

It’s also amusing, if meaningless, that the Epstein money trail saga involves both a Les and a Jes, plus two grown men named Jamie.

10. The backlog of suspicious report filings after Epstein’s 2019 death seem to demonstrate a consciousness of guilt.

On this point, the Times pulls no punches:

Bank officials for more than a decade were anxious about Epstein’s prolific wire transfers and cash withdrawals — JPMorgan ultimately processed more than $1 billion in such transactions for him — and warned senior management about his suspicious activities. But on at least four occasions over five years, the bank’s leaders overrode those objections and continued to serve Epstein.

And Raskin hits even harder:

Despite the flagrant nature of Mr. Epstein’s activities, JPMorgan did not file a single SAR during that time. It was only after Mr. Epstein’s death that JPMorgan retroactively conducted a review of Mr. Epstein’s transactions and filed its first SARs, covering a staggering 4,700 transactions totaling $1.1 billion. Many of these SARs were filed over a decade later than statutorily required.

Documents further show that Mr. Epstein repeatedly communicated with the Chief Executive of the Investment Bank at JPMorgan [Jes Staley], who alerted Mr. Epstein to the bank’s sensitivity about his constant cash withdrawals, and offered him the opportunity to alter his tactics to avoid detection. The JPMorgan executive [Staley] also repeatedly intervened to ensure that JPMorgan’s compliance functions would not interfere with Mr. Epstein’s activities. Even more disturbing, in 2010, after Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty to engaging in sex with a minor, the same JPMorgan executive [Staley] visited Mr. Epstein’s properties in New Mexico, New York, and the Caribbean. His email correspondence with Mr. Epstein after one of these visits suggests he may have become complicit in Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. He wrote: “That was fun. Say hi to Snow White.” Mr. Epstein, chillingly, responded by asking which character he would like next, to which the JPMorgan executive responded: “Beauty and the Beast.”

11. So far, JPMorgan has gotten off easy…

In 2023, JPMorgan agreed to pay $290 million to settle a class action lawsuit brought by the victims of Epstein. It also paid $75 million to the US Virgin Islands to settle a sex trafficking lawsuit brought by the territory where Epstein’s private island was located. That’s $365 million total — a million bucks a day for a year; a decent-sized Powerball pot.

But JPMorgan had a net income last year of $58.5 billion. The payouts are just a fraction of a percent of that: a rounding error. In terms of severity, it’s akin to the punishment Epstein himself received from Alex Acosta in the notorious 2008 non-prosecution agreement.

Those settlements are equivalent to what I would pay for a speeding ticket: for going 50 in a 25 zone — not for abetting, for years, the operations of the most notorious child sex trafficker in recent memory.

12. …but this isn’t the end.

Just yesterday, Courthouse News reports, 

[a Manhattan federal judge] ordered the unsealing of more than 100 documents from a civil lawsuit brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands against JPMorgan Chase over the finances of disgraced pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, a Bill Clinton appointee in the Southern District of New York, broadly granted a request from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to release sealed exhibits from the summary judgment phase of the case, which was settled in 2023.

Some of the filings purportedly contain “financial settlements from JPMorgan Chase, either for accounts controlled by Epstein or the accounts of victims of Epstein’s crimes,” according to Times journalist Matthew Goldstein, who sought a broad unsealing of “financial documents” from the case.

It may be that there will be no new revelations in those documents — but JPMorgan isn’t out of the Epstein woods quite yet.

***

In the pull quote at the top of JPMorganChase’s annual report, Dimon writes: 

We are champions of banking’s essential role in a community — its potential for bringing people together, for enabling companies and individuals to attain their goals, and for being a source of strength in difficult times. The work we do matters and has impact.

He’s right. The work does matter, and it does have impact — enormous impact: for good and, as in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, for ill.

But if I were in charge of the firm’s corporate communications, I would maybe suggest using a different word from enabling.

As a service to our readers, we curate noteworthy stories through partnerships with outside writers and thinkers. This column originally appeared in Greg Olear’s Substack PREVAIL and has been adapted with the author’s permission.