The top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee issued a report on Thursday calling for an investigation into whether JPMorgan Chase deliberately underreported more than $1 billion in suspicious transactions by Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender.
The report from the senator, Ron Wyden of Oregon, said the compliance failures by the nation’s largest bank during its nearly 15-year relationship with Mr. Epstein were “alarming” and impeded law enforcement’s ability to examine the “financial infrastructure that enabled Epstein’s cross-border sex trafficking organization.”
The report, based on recently unsealed court records that shed more light on JPMorgan’s financial dealings with Mr. Epstein, focuses on suspicious activity reports, or SARs, which banks are required to file with the Treasury Department when they suspect a financial transaction may be involved in an illicit activity such as money laundering, terrorism or sex trafficking.
The report said JPMorgan filed suspicious activity reports covering $4.3 million in transactions by Mr. Epstein from 2002 to 2016. But it waited until after Mr. Epstein’s arrest on sex trafficking charges in 2019 and subsequent death to file reports that described some $1.3 billion in transactions as suspicious.
Internal bank emails suggest JPMorgan may have waited to file those reports because it wanted “to continue working with Epstein” as a source of referrals for business even after firing him as a client in 2013, the report found.
Mr. Wyden, in a statement, said it was “clear that JPMorgan Chase ought to face criminal investigation for the way it enabled Epstein’s horrific crimes.” The report said both Congress and the Justice Department should investigate the bank.
The bank has repeatedly said it regrets its dealings with Mr. Epstein and did all it could with the information it had at the time. “The second the government finally made public the sex trafficking details in 2019 — information they clearly had for years — we identified for law enforcement a range of Epstein’s past transactions intended to assist with the investigation,” Patricia Wexler, a spokeswoman for the bank, said in a statement on Thursday.
Mr. Epstein has been a matter of intense focus in recent weeks, as well as those close to him — including JPMorgan Chase, which paid $230 million in 2023 to settle a class-action lawsuit by his victims that accused it of enabling his crimes.
President Trump, a one-time friend of Mr. Epstein’s who did an about-face this week and signed a law that directing the Justice Department to release information on Mr. Epstein’s crimes, has called for the department to investigate JPMorgan along with several prominent Democrats who had associated with Mr. Epstein.
Also this week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued a subpoena to the bank seeking documents and records about its dealings with Mr. Epstein.
Matthew Goldstein is a Times reporter who covers Wall Street and white-collar crime and housing issues.
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