Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, called on Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, to provide detailed information about the bank’s 15-year relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“The victims of Epstein’s abuse and the American public deserve answers on the role the U.S. banks played in enabling Epstein’s crimes,” Mr. Wyden wrote in a letter on Wednesday, the latest push by Democrats and some Republicans to investigate the part major financial institutions played in enabling Mr. Epstein’s decades-long sex trafficking operation.
Earlier this month, 10 Democratic senators, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, urged the Senate Banking Committee to hold hearings into JPMorgan’s ties to Mr. Epstein, who remained a client at the bank for years after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to a charge of soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl.
JPMorgan declined to comment.
The pressure on JPMorgan comes after an investigation by The New York Times Magazine that examined the bank’s relationship with Mr. Epstein during a time when he was regularly sexually abusing teenage girls and young women. Some senior executives repeatedly ignored staff members’ concerns about Mr. Epstein opening accounts for young women and his repeated pattern of withdrawing tens of thousands of dollars in cash nearly every month — a potential indicator of sex trafficking, experts have said.
Mr. Wyden has been digging into Mr. Epstein’s financial backers for the past three years. As part of that investigation, Mr. Wyden’s staff examined billions of dollars in transactions that JPMorgan and other banks flagged as suspicious after Mr. Epstein’s arrest on federal charges in 2019. That included more than $1.1 billion in transactions involving JPMorgan, including hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to Russian banks and young women from Eastern Europe who were brought to the United States, according to Mr. Wyden’s investigation.
In his letter, Mr. Wyden asked Mr. Dimon to respond to nearly three-dozen questions concerning JPMorgan’s decision to keep Mr. Epstein as a client long after his 2008 guilty plea to state charges in Florida.
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The post Wyden Presses JPMorgan Chief Dimon for Answers on Jeffrey Epstein appeared first on New York Times.
