Jes Staley Answered Congress on Epstein Off-Oath. Britain Already Banned Him for Lying About It.

He denies all wrongdoing. Britain already banned him for lying about how close he stood to Epstein.

On Thursday, July 23, Jes Staley sat with the House Oversight Committee and answered questions about Jeffrey Epstein. He came voluntarily. He was not under oath. And by the account of Chairman James Comer, Staley is “on record defending Epstein and encouraging JPMorgan to keep him as a client.” Representative Emily Randall said Staley kept failing to recall — “because he is not under oath, because he is not compelled to answer.”

Staley is not a bystander to the Epstein story. He is the banker who ran the money.

For more than a decade at JPMorgan, Staley managed Epstein’s accounts and his relationship with the bank. He met Epstein around 2000, visited his island, and kept the door open after Epstein’s 2006 arrest in Palm Beach. In 2023, JPMorgan paid Epstein’s victims $290 million to settle claims that it had helped his trafficking. Narativ’s archive holds the emails Staley sent from his JPMorgan address straight into Epstein’s inbox, and an FBI evidence file that agents titled “The Jeffrey Epstein & Jes Staley Blackmail Ring.”

What each side said walking out

• Comer: “It appears that within JPMorgan there were red flags about Epstein, but Mr. Staley is on record defending Epstein and encouraging JPMorgan to keep him as a client”.

• Ranking member Robert Garcia: “He’s claiming he had no real friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. That is just ridiculous… a man who is brazenly lying, being so cavalier — ‘No, I don’t know, I don’t recall’”.

• Per a source on the testimony, Staley said he was “unsure” whether he met a woman in a Snow White costume through Epstein, and separately acknowledged a sexual relationship with a colleague’s assistant.

Congress is not the first authority to test Staley’s account of the friendship. Staley became CEO of Barclays in 2015 and resigned in 2021 after Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority examined how he had described Epstein. Staley had approved a letter to the regulator claiming he did not have a close relationship with Epstein. His own emails said otherwise: he called Epstein one of his “deepest” and “most cherished” friends, and he was in contact with Epstein in the days before his Barclays appointment was announced. The FCA banned him from senior finance roles. The Upper Tribunal upheld the ban in 2025. Staley lost roughly £18 million in pay.

Narativ has reported for months that Staley sits inside a financial story, not only a sex-crime story. In The Greatest Heist, Narativ traces the network — Epstein, his bankers, and Leslie Wexner — back to a 1995 meeting in Ohio, and argues that the same men stood at the center of the 2008 financial collapse. Staley’s career runs along that thesis: private banking at JPMorgan, then the top of Barclays, then a regulator’s ban for hiding how close he stood to Epstein.

Staley denies all wrongdoing, and his lawyer has called the abetting claims “baseless” and “slanderous.”

The committee that questioned him has the emails. So does Narativ. A man already banned in Britain for misleading a regulator has now told the United States Congress, off-oath, that he did nothing wrong. Whether that answer costs him anything sits with the committee.