Wyden Found the Money Case DOJ Buried in 2007
Three banks sat on Epstein's paperwork for years — and CBS spiked the story that would have aired it
Sen. Ron Wyden released a 67-page report Tuesday showing three of America’s biggest banks watched Jeffrey Epstein’s money move for years and sat on the paperwork federal law required them to file. JPMorgan filed seven suspicious activity reports covering $4.3 million between 2002 and 2016, Wyden’s investigators found. After Epstein’s July 2019 arrest, the bank went back and flagged more than 5,000 wire transfers worth $1.3 billion — a 300-fold gap between what it told Treasury while Epstein banked there and what it admitted once he sat in a cell.
Deutsche Bank, which took Epstein in after JPMorgan dropped him in 2013, failed to promptly report more than $250 million in suspicious transactions, the report says, including wires paying women in Russia and Eastern Europe. Bank of America reported $170 million in transactions linked to Apollo co-founder Leon Black five to seven years late — wires the bank’s own filing said had "no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose." Black denies wrongdoing and faces no charges; the late filings are the bank’s conduct, not his.
Narativ has reported this trail since Wyden first wrote to Jamie Dimon last October, and the report lands somewhere specific: it is the federal money case the Justice Department buried 19 years ago, rebuilt by Senate staff. Federal prosecutor Marie Villafaña opened a financial investigation into Epstein’s money in February 2007. Her Request No. 6 sought the structure of his funds and the Wexner money, and DOJ consulted its own money-laundering section on the trail. Then the 2007 non-prosecution agreement extinguished the probe — no financial count filed in 2007, none in 2019. As Narativ wrote in The Greatest Heist: follow the money and you don’t find a sex crime. You find the operation.
