The Epstein Files and the 5-Count Felon Bank: The Untold Story

As the summer from hell fades to an anxious autumn, Americans’ worst dystopian nightmares have evolved into their daily reality. A 34-count felon, convicted unanimously by a 12-member jury, sits behind the Resolute Desk in the White House, barking out threats or actual orders to send troops to the streets of American cities—even though no emergency exists—as he files billion-dollar lawsuits against newspapers that fail to accept subservience to authoritarian rule.

Millions of Americans believe Trump’s increasing displays of force are to distract and redirect the public’s attention from the Trump administration’s refusal to release the now infamous “Epstein files”—a government archive built over two decades detailing why and how a college dropout named Jeffrey Epstein was able to defy the FBI and Justice Department under at least four presidents as he raped or sexually assaulted “over one thousand victims.” That victim count comes directly from a July 7 memorandum from Trump’s own DOJ and FBI. Many of Epstein’s victims were girls as young as 13 and 14 according to court filings.

That same July 7 unsigned memorandum from Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice and Kash Patel’s FBI revealed the shocker that these taxpayer-financed federal law enforcement agencies would not be releasing the most critical Epstein files to the American people: Documents that would show the names of everyone who financed Epstein’s sick lifestyle for decades and the written reports given by Epstein’s victims to the FBI detailing how they were trafficked to Epstein’s clients or pals at his luxury residences in Manhattan, Palm Beach, New Mexico, Paris, U.S. Virgin Islands, and potentially, other locations.

The contours of the Epstein coverup by the Trump administration took on greater clarity on Tuesday, September 16, when FBI Director Patel testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and provided a stunning new narrative. Patel is now effectively calling Epstein’s victims liars on their allegations that Epstein trafficked them to his rich or powerful pals for sex.

This new narrative from Patel comes notwithstanding that some of the victims making these allegations have provided sworn statements and/or sworn depositions naming the men that Epstein trafficked them to; notwithstanding that Prince Andrew has settled one case and was stripped of his military titles by the late Queen Elizabeth; notwithstanding that a former top executive at JPMorgan Chase, Jes Staley, has admitted to sleeping with a woman who was trafficked by Epstein; and notwithstanding that there are multiple eyewitnesses to some of Epstein’s sex parties with trafficked girls.

Patel was sworn in for the September 16 hearing. That puts him in legal jeopardy if it can be shown that he intentionally perjured himself on a multitude of his answers that were deemed suspect to members of the Committee.

It should be noted that Patel had zero criminal law enforcement experience when he was tapped by Trump to head the 36,000-person FBI.

When asked during the Senate Judiciary hearing by Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) who Epstein had trafficked his victims to, Patel stated this: “There is no credible information, none. If there were, I would bring the case yesterday that he trafficked to other individuals. And the information we have, again, is limited.”

The evidence is not limited. The July 7 joint memorandum from the DOJ/FBI stated that the Justice Department has “300 gigabytes” of data on the case. That’s the equivalent of 19.5 million Word documents. Thus far, the Justice Department has turned over approximately 34,000 documents to the House Oversight Committee.

Two already revealed clients of Epstein, who paid him $170 million and at least $100 million, respectively, according to court and Senate Finance Committee documents, are Leon Black, former CEO of the private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, and Leslie Wexner, former Chairman and CEO of the retailing juggernaut, L Brands, which owned Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works among numerous other retail chains at one time or another.

Both Black and Wexner have been named by Epstein’s victims as men he trafficked them to. Both men have denied the charges. Black paid $62.5 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands to settle its investigation into Epstein’s sex trafficking on the secluded island compound he owned there and Black’s involvement in it.

Epstein, Wexner and Black all had accounts at the same financial institution—JPMorgan Chase. This bank is both a trading juggernaut on Wall Street as well as owning the largest federally-insured commercial bank in the United States—Chase Bank, which operates over 5,000 branches from coast to coast. Chase Bank takes in saving deposits from unsuspecting moms and pops working in the corn fields of Iowa to the fishing villages of Maine.

We use the term “unsuspecting” mom and pop depositors because in 2013 the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 300-page report documenting how JPMorgan Chase had used deposits from its federally-insured Chase Bank to gamble in derivatives in London and lose “at least” $6.2 billion. Scandals and crimes at JPMorgan Chase are so ubiquitous that they require their own name by the business press. This one was called the “London Whale.”

Credit for resurrecting the trading/banking structure that brought down the U.S. financial system after the Wall Street crash of 1929 goes to the Wall Street cozy Bill Clinton administration. It repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 that had barred commercial banks from merging with trading firms on Wall Street for 66 years. That repeal allowed Wall Street’s trading houses to merge with the largest taxpayer-backstopped, deposit-taking banks and become unruly behemoths. It took just nine years after the repeal of Glass-Steagall for Wall Street to blow up the mega banks in the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression. The Federal Reserve has been quietly propping up these mega banks with tens of trillions of dollars in bailouts ever since.

JPMorgan Chase settled the London Whale abuses with its regulators in September 2013 for $920 million. The ink was barely dry on those agreements when the bank in January 2014 admitted to two felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice over the bank and its predecessors laundering money for decades for the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history—the one operated by Bernie Madoff.

The way that JPMorgan Chase facilitated money laundering for Epstein sounds uncannily similar to how it facilitated money laundering for Ponzi kingpin Bernie Madoff. Both Epstein and Madoff used JPMorgan Chase as their primary bank according to court records. And the bank made multi-million dollar loans to both men.

FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge George Venizelos said this in a formal statement when the two felony counts were lodged against JPMorgan Chase in 2014 over its Madoff conduct:

“J.P. Morgan failed to carry out its legal obligations while Bernard Madoff built his massive house of cards. Today, J.P. Morgan finds itself criminally charged as a consequence. But it took until after the arrest of Madoff, one of the worst crooks this office has ever seen, for J.P. Morgan to alert authorities to what the world already knew. In order to avoid these types of disasters in the future—we all need to be invested in making our markets safer and more equitable. The FBI can’t do it alone. Traders, compliance officers, analysts, bankers, and executives are the gatekeepers of the financial industry. We need their help protecting our markets.”

Let that carefully sink in for a moment. JPMorgan Chase, then and now headed by media darling Jamie Dimon (as both Chairman and CEO) was simultaneously laundering money for two of the biggest criminal masterminds in U.S. history. Exactly what was it that these two Machiavellian marauders found so comforting about running their financial affairs out of JPMorgan Chase? The answer is more than likely found in a three-letter acronym—SAR, short for Suspicious Activity Report. If you were running illicit billions of dollars through the bank, and generating big profits for the bank, that pesky detail of filing those SARs in a timely fashion with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), as legally mandated, somehow gets forgotten at the bank, at least in both the Madoff and Epstein cases.

Despite enormous red flags on weird money transactions, JPMorgan Chase failed to file any Madoff-related Suspicious Activity Reports until Madoff confessed to his crimes in December 2008 after being turned in to prosecutors by his sons. What the bank did do, however, was to blow the whistle not to law enforcement in its home country but to a foreign regulator. On October 29, 2008, according to the Justice Department, JPMorgan filed a report with regulators in the United Kingdom, telling them that Madoff’s portfolio returns, as reflected on its clients’ statements, were “probably” “too good to be true.”

According to a federal court filing in 2023 by the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein trafficked underage girls for rape and sexual abuse at his luxury island compound, JPMorgan Chase processed 9,000 transactions totaling $2.4 billion for Epstein from 2005 through 2019, without ever filing the legally mandated Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). From 2008 on, Epstein was a registered sex offender, a fact known to the bank according to internal emails obtained in discovery and filed with the court. Epstein was also taking tens of thousands of dollars each month in hard cash from his accounts at JPMorgan Chase. The bank waited until after Epstein’s death in 2019 to file its SARs.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, part of the Justice Department, criminally charged JPMorgan Chase for its Madoff-related crimes in 2014 and made it pay $1.7 billion to the victims of Madoff’s fraud. We’ve heard nothing from that same office about charging the bank for its involvement for at least 15 years in Epstein’s money laundering to facilitate his sex crimes against children.

Just Epstein and one of his procurers, Ghislaine Maxwell, have been charged by federal prosecutors. Epstein died in his jail cell on August 10, 2019. The New York City Medical Examiner ruled his death a suicide. Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for “heinous crimes against children,” including sex trafficking. She was moved this year from a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida to a minimum-security, dormitory style facility in Bryan, Texas following her bizarre interview by Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, now the Deputy Attorney General at the Justice Department. In that interview, Maxwell said she never saw anything inappropriate by Trump. What is inappropriate to a woman capable of heinous sex crimes against children and what is inappropriate to decent Americans may be very different things.

The fact that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) has not brought felony charges against JPMorgan Chase as it did against the bank’s Madoff involvement, raises more questions about the heavy hand of Donald Trump, dating all the way back to his first administration.

In Trump 1.0, Geoffrey Berman was the U.S. Attorney in the SDNY when Epstein was indicted on federal sex trafficking charges after getting a sweetheart deal in Florida 11 years earlier that saw him serve just 13 months in a work-release program at the county jail. But Berman was not willing to be the easily-molded lieutenant that Trump demanded of his lackeys. So late on a Friday evening, June 19, 2020, Trump’s Attorney General William Barr told a lie to the American people: Barr announced that Berman was resigning his post as U.S. Attorney for the SDNY. As for who was going to replace Berman, Barr wrote this: “I am pleased to announce that President Trump intends to nominate Jay Clayton, currently the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to serve as the next United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.”

Leaving Barr with egg all over his face, two hours later Berman released his own statement indicating that Barr had just told a brazen lie to the American people. Berman’s statement was this: “I learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was ‘stepping down’ as United States Attorney. I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning my position, to which I was appointed by the Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.”

The following day, Barr issued another statement indicating that Donald Trump was removing Berman from his post but would leave Berman’s Deputy in charge of the office on an interim basis. Barr had stated the prior Friday evening that he would be putting in Craig Carpenito, the sitting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, as acting head of the office until Clayton could be confirmed by the Senate. The acknowledgement by Barr that Berman’s Deputy would be allowed to fill the post until a confirmation occurred appeased Berman and he agreed to step down.

Clayton had never served a day as a criminal prosecutor at a state or federal level. At the time of Clayton’s confirmation hearing in 2017 to serve as Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Clayton was a partner at Wall Street’s go-to law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, which had represented 8 of the 10 largest Wall Street mega banks, including JPMorgan Chase.

At the time of Berman’s dismissal by Trump, JPMorgan Chase was under criminal investigation by that office. And JPMorgan had notched a third felony count in its belt having been criminally charged in 2015 for rigging foreign currency markets as part of a cartel. Once again, the bank was handed a deferred prosecution agreement by the Justice Department and Jamie Dimon was left in place as Chairman and CEO.

If Berman had remained in charge at the SDNY, this serial recidivist bank might not get, in the future, the deferred prosecution agreements it had received routinely in the past—where it is put on probation, pays a big fine, promises to go straight, then goes right back to its crime spree. (See its breathtaking Rap Sheet here.)

But with Berman gone and the threat that Clayton might be the new boss at the SDNY, JPMorgan Chase was given yet another deferred prosecution agreement for two more felony counts, this time for manipulating precious metals markets and for manipulating the U.S. Treasury securities market. The bank had now been charged with 5 felony counts in six years, something that should have put it out of business or, at a minimum, under new leadership. Instead, Jamie Dimon got a $50 million bonus from his Board of Directors.

The U.S. Attorney for the SDNY has a long history of holding a big press conference with easels and big posters to illustrate clearly why it is charging a big Wall Street name with criminal acts. But there was no press conference this time around.

The attempted Friday night coup at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan put both Barr and Clayton under an unflattering spotlight. Both New York Senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, indicated that they would not give the greenlight to Clayton’s nomination to move into the U.S. Attorney spot. Senator Lindsey Graham, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, indicated he would not move Clayton’s nomination forward without the approval of those two Senators, following a longstanding policy of the Judiciary Committee.

A majority of faculty from Barr’s alma mater, George Washington University Law School, sent a letter after the attempted coup stating that Barr’s actions “have undermined the rule of law, breached constitutional norms, and damaged the integrity and traditional independence of his office and of the Department of Justice.”

Following Trump’s presidential election win in November 2024, Trump wasted no time in resurrecting his effort to install Clayton as the top prosecutor and head of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the SDNY. Just nine days after the election on November 5, 2024, Trump nominated Clayton. Rather than being confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Clayton is serving as the result of a federal court appointment.

In Trump’s world, there increasingly seems to be only three degrees of separation. After Leon Black’s relationship with Epstein was revealed, the Apollo Board of Directors hired an outside law firm to investigate. Black stepped down as CEO at Apollo and Jay Clayton, following his departure as SEC Chair, became Chairman and Lead Independent Director at Apollo Global Management. According to Apollo’s annual proxy filed with the SEC, Clayton was simultaneously serving as “a Senior Policy Advisor and Of Counsel to Sullivan & Cromwell.”

The July 7 joint memorandum from Trump’s DOJ/FBI said there was no evidence that any other third party should be charged with crimes related to Epstein. Another law enforcement office saw that quite differently. In late 2022 the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands filed a civil complaint against JPMorgan Chase in federal court in Manhattan. In a July 2023 Memorandum of Law arguing for partial summary judgment in the case, the U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General made the following points regarding JPMorgan Chase’s active engagement in Epstein’s crimes:

“Even if participation requires active engagement…there is no genuine dispute that JPMorgan actively participated in Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture from 2006 until 2019. The Court found allegations that the Bank allowed Epstein to use its accounts to send dozens of payments to then-known co-conspirators [redacted] provided excessive and unusual amounts of cash to Epstein; and structured cash withdrawals so that those withdrawals would not appear suspicious ‘went well beyond merely providing their usual [banking] services to Jeffrey Epstein and his affiliated entities’ and were sufficient to allege active engagement.”

David Boies, an attorney who also sued JPMorgan Chase in 2022 on behalf of Epstein’s victims, alleged in a court filing that the bank had even used the corporate jet of its hedge fund, Highbridge Capital, to transport Epstein’s victims for sex trafficking purposes.

JPMorgan Chase ended up settling the Boies case on behalf of victims for $290 million while paying the U.S. Virgin Islands $75 million to settle its case to avoid a public jury trial and the details of its behavior being aired in a public courtroom.

This summer of madness shows no signs of relief as Americans move into the darkening skies of autumn. A 2003, leather bound, 50th birthday book of notes and sketches celebrating the life of the worst sex trafficker of underage girls in U.S. history, has been released to the public after having its existence exposed by the Wall Street Journal (which Trump is suing for $10 billion). Among the depraved writings and scribblings by Epstein’s powerful debauchery cabal is one allegedly signed by Donald Trump. The text attributed to Trump is placed inside the outline of a headless, armless, naked woman’s body and includes this prophetic sentence: “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump, whose propensity for falsehoods is now legendary, denies writing or signing this birthday card, even after the birthday book in which it was professionally bound 22 years ago, was subpoenaed and released by the Republican Chair of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer. The book came directly from the Epstein estate.

The birthday note from Wexner to Epstein, professionally bound into the same 22-year old book, is a sketch of a woman’s breasts with this text: “Dear Jeffrey. I wanted to get you what you want, so here it is….Happy Birthday Your friend Leslie.”

On July 23, 2023 we sent the following email to the Public Records department at taxpayer-subsidized Ohio State University, where Wexner’s name adorns the Medical Center and Arts Center. The request was made under the state’s sunshine law:

This is a request under the Ohio Public Records Act…

We have recently been reporting on disturbing ties between Leslie Wexner, the former long-term Chairman and CEO of The Limited, subsequently renamed L Brands, and Jeffrey Epstein, a man with a detailed history of sexual assaults of underage girls who was indicted in 2019 by the U.S. Department of Justice for sex-trafficking of underage girls, was a registered sex offender, and previously served jail time in Florida for sex with a minor.

Mr. Wexner’s ties to Epstein were extensive: the L Brands corporate jet ended up being owned by Epstein; Wexner’s ownership of a mansion on the upper East Side of Manhattan was transferred to Epstein; a 10,600 square foot home in New Albany, Ohio that was previously owned by Wexner was transferred to Epstein; Epstein held a power of attorney for Wexner’s financial dealings from approximately 1986 to 2007, and so forth.

Given this history between the two men, and the fact that Wexner’s name adorns numerous buildings at Ohio State University and that Wexner has been a large donor to Ohio State University’s facilities, we seek the following records:

(1) copies of any investigative reports conducted by, or on behalf of, Ohio State University into the relationship between Wexner and Epstein;

(2) copies of any investigative reports into the relationship between Wexner and Epstein conducted by the law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell, or Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

(3) any communication, electronic or written, that was provided by Leslie Wexner or his representative to Ohio State University (or has come into its hands) that provided Wexner’s version of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

After more than a month of prodding by us, we received the following response from Ohio State University:

“The university has found no responsive records to your request. In 2020, the university completed a review of giving by Jeffrey Epstein. The results of that review, along with public records associated with that review, can be found here: https://news.osu.edu/statement-from-the-ohio-state-university-regarding-completion-of-jeffrey-epstein-review/.”

Last week, we came by another curious piece of information involving Wexner. After the U.S. Virgin Islands filed their federal lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, one of the documents they obtained in discovery and filed with the court was a list of the “Epstein-related” accounts that Epstein oversaw at the bank. In addition to multiple accounts with the name Wexner, there were two accounts called “Ranch Lake II” and “Ranch Lake III.” The JPMorgan Chase document described these accounts like this: “Jeffrey Epstein is a longstanding client. He has established these C corps. to hold property in Colorado and to pay staff and maintenance cost.”

Documents at the Colorado Secretary of State’s archive of business entities in the state show that Ranch Lake II and Ranch Lake III share the same address in New Albany, Ohio as the Wexner Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Leslie Wexner.

As far as we are aware, properties in Colorado have never been disclosed or investigated as a place where Epstein might have abused his victims or trafficked them for abuse by others.

The post The Epstein Files and the 5-Count Felon Bank: The Untold Story appeared first on CounterPunch.org.