For months now, the largest federally-insured bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, represented by WilmerHale, a law firm with more than 1,000 attorneys, has been attempting to bamboozle the American people with the narrative that it engaged in no wrongdoing when it provided millions of dollars in cold, hard cash to child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein for more than a decade – without following the legal mandate of reporting this suspicious account activity to law enforcement. Internal emails produced in discovery in two lawsuits against the bank in federal court in Manhattan show that the bank was well aware that Epstein was a known sexual predator of children as it doled out all of this cash – at times reaching $40,000 to $80,000 per month.
The legal narrative that the WilmerHale attorneys crafted for the public and the media is this: a sole former employee of the bank – Jes Staley – is responsible for all of the bank’s wrongdoing involving Epstein, never mind that the bank was all too willing to take the lucrative business deals and clients that came its way from Epstein via Staley, as also documented in internal emails. To get headlines promoting this narrative, the bank has made a big deal of suing Staley on the premise that it wants to recover its legal costs by clawing back his compensation.
Victims of Epstein had filed a class action lawsuit against the bank last year. The bank offered a settlement of $290 million in that matter in June, which is pending a final fairness hearing. The bank did not acknowledge wrongdoing. (See our report here for the $87 million in legal fees under the settlement for the plaintiffs’ attorneys and the onerous terms for Epstein’s victims.) The second Epstein-related lawsuit against the bank, which is ongoing, was filed by the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein built a private island compound and engaged in sex trafficking of underage girls.
Given how much time and space media outlets in New York and London have devoted to spinning this tale about Staley (who is certainly not an innocent character by any means, but hardly the mastermind), thinking Americans must ask themselves, why is there now a total news blackouts when a new lawsuit has been filed against JPMorgan Chase with a highly credible bombshell theory of the case: that the same members of JPMorgan’s Board of Directors who brought its Chairman and CEO to power, Jamie Dimon, were also, verifiably, engaged in business with Jeffrey Epstein. (This is not the first time that a major scandal involving JPMorgan Chase has received a news blackout by mainstream media.)
This latest lawsuit brought by two pension funds that owned shares of JPMorgan Chase names both Dimon and Staley as defendants, as well as current and former members of JPMorgan Chase’s Board of Directors. It has been brought by a prominent class action law firm on behalf of shareholders of the bank. The lawsuit’s theory of the case is that specific members of the Board of JPMorgan Chase “put their heads in the sand” and ignored that the bank had become a cash conduit for Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring because they were hoping that their own business ties to Epstein “would go unnoticed.” (We might add an attendant thesis: that Dimon takes very good care of his Board in return for them taking very good care of him.)
