Congressional Democrats are poised to turn their sights to the role that Wall Street played in enabling the sexual-abuse crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.
A group of Democratic legislators, with an eye on retaking the House, the Senate or both in elections next month, are set on Thursday to introduce a bill that calls on financial regulators to investigate banks and financial executives who did business with Mr. Epstein and potentially make criminal referrals to federal prosecutors.
Several committees in the House and Senate are also prepared to interview bankers who worked with Mr. Epstein and potentially hold hearings into his financial affairs if Democrats control either chamber, said Democratic staff members who were briefed on the matter but not authorized to discuss it publicly. Two backers of the new bill, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Robert Garcia, are the top Democrats on the Senate Banking and House Oversight Committees and likely to become chairs if their party prevails.
The bill, the Epstein Wall Street Records Act, would also require four federal financial regulators, including the Federal Reserve, to publicly release any records they have related to Mr. Epstein and his associates.
Until now, the main congressional investigation into Mr. Epstein this year, by the House Oversight Committee, has focused largely on employees or friends of the disgraced financier, who died by suicide in 2019 after his arrest on federal sex-trafficking charges. The committee has focused less on the handful of big banks that managed thousands of wire transfers for Mr. Epstein — money he used to make payments to the hundreds of teenage girls and young women he sexually abused.
The measure, led by Ms. Warren of Massachusetts, has the backing of three other Senate Democrats and 20 Democrats in the House, including Mr. Garcia of California, according to Ms. Warren’s office.
The measure, which will be introduced in both the Senate and House, is unlikely to pass this year. The lone Republican to endorse the bill is Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, the House’s most prominent Republican critic of President Trump and a leading proponent of efforts to force the Justice Department to release all of its investigatory files on Mr. Epstein.
Lawsuits brought on behalf of hundreds of Mr. Epstein’s victims claimed that three big banks — JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America — often ignored, in the pursuit of profits, warning signs relating to his activities. Together, those banks agreed to pay more than $437 million to settle those class-action lawsuits.
But only Deutsche Bank has been penalized by a U.S. regulator for providing banking services to Mr. Epstein. In 2020, the bank paid a $150 million fine to New York bank regulators, partly because of its failure to practice due diligence in monitoring Mr. Epstein’s financial affairs.
A position paper explaining the bill that was shared with The New York Times said Ms. Warren would introduce the measure because federal financial regulators had not committed to conducting any investigation into Mr. Epstein’s financial affairs. Her office on Thursday released a copy of a three-paragraph letter it received in June from the Federal Reserve in which the central bank said it took its oversight of the nation’s banks seriously but could not comment further.
“I have spent the last year calling on Donald Trump’s financial regulators to launch investigations into the big banks and executives who may have enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s horrific crimes,” Ms. Warren said.
The new bill builds on some of the work done by Senator Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, who this summer released a report that focused on the failure of Wall Street banks to promptly notify financial regulators of potentially suspicious transactions they had handled for Mr. Epstein. In the report, Mr. Wyden, who is backing Ms. Warren’s bill, called for Congress to stiffen federal anti-money-laundering laws.
The post Midterms Could Shift Focus of Epstein Abuse to Banks’ Role appeared first on New York Times.
