House of Epstein, House of Morgan, House of Windsor ... House of Warren?

With new Epstein documents released, we revisit Jamie Dimon’s role in a global pedophile ring - and the impotence of the Bank Secrecy Act.

Yesterday saw the release of a new tranche of documents in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, though it’s unclear so far if there’s much new there of real substance. The documents are releases from the 2017 Virginia Guiffre suit, previously under seal.

The unsealing comes just a few weeks after a seemingly coordinated performance in Congress in which JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, under questioning from Senator Elizabeth Warren, declared that if he were the government, he would “shut down” cryptocurrency networks. This was part of Warren’s push to (somehow) make crypto networks subject to the Bank Secrecy Act, a wildly ineffectual anti-money laundering regime that amounts to providing plausible deniability for banks whose clients turn out to be drug dealers or pedophiles.

As I wrote at the time, Warren’s performative veneration of the Bank Secrecy Act, in pursuit of her narrow anti-crypto agenda, amounted to providing cover for elite crimes committed through the current banking system - and by Morgan in particular. Because JPMorgan was Jeffrey Epstein’s bank for the bulk of his time as a globetrotting child-trafficker. The bank facilitated Epstein’s activities – Epstein was known to make large cash withdrawals for reasons I’ll leave to your inference. Morgan, under Dimon’s leadership, has paid roughly $365 million in two settlements related to helping Epstein commit heinous acts.

And of course, there is the second layer. It is nearly certain that Epstein was engaged in the blackmail of powerful people, and seems to have built his wealth in part by leveraging his ability to procure underage women for others – including government figures. This means that JPMorgan effectively profited from a system for subverting democracy via the abuse of young girls.

(There are other reasons Morgan might have been more careful: Though it hasn’t been widely reported, Epstein was in the mid-1990s associated with Towers Financial, whose head was convicted of running one of the largest pre-Madoff ponzi schemes, fleecing investors for $450 million. The convicted perp, Steven Hoffenberg, claimed Epstein was his partner in the scheme, though Epstein was never criminally charged.)

The Epstein relationship continued at Morgan despite Morgan’s own employees filing numerous Suspicious Activity Reports about Epstein’s withdrawals and other banking activities. Dimon has claimed to have known little or nothing about Epstein or Epstein’s accounts, despite the fact that much of this activity came after Epstein’s initial 2009 conviction on sex trafficking charges.

But there is some evidence Dimon might be lying about his awareness. For one, Epstein was simply a very high-profile client. Epstein’s account was handled from 2000 to 2009 personally by Jes Staley, a “star” private banker at JPM, for a time a candidate to become Dimon’s successor, and later CEO of Barclays.

Staley was Epstein’s main champion over the years at JPMorgan, and it seems quite clear he also partook of Epstein’s main product – young women. Staley became one of the primary fall guys within Morgan for their entanglement with Epstein – which, as an apparent violent rapist, is the least he deserves. Emails showed Epstein and Staley were intimate – they exchanged a reported 1,200 emails between 2008 and 2012, including allusions to Epstein arranging sex for Staley.

Jamie Dimon, for his part, has denied he had any substantive awareness of Epstein or his account. But Staley was a former star at Morgan, not a marginal middleman. And Staley has contradicted Dimon’s denials, saying he communicated with Dimon several times about Epstein, and whether to keep the accounts. A 2008 email from a lower-level banker said that Epstein’s account was likely to be terminated “pending Dimon review.”

This is obviously relevant to Dimon’s characterization of crypto networks as tools for criminal activity. Maybe his real point was that he wanted to shut down crypto so that Morgan could retain its near-monopoly on facilitating lucrative criminality by the ultra-wealthy?

More broadly, investigative reporter Conchita Sarnoff has tied sex trafficking directly to the banking industry. “Human trafficking is a globally profitable business and banks are the engine that keep human trafficking networks-great and small-operational.”

Beyond the specific immorality of particular bankers, Epstein’s unconstrained use of the banking system points to a fundamental structural flaw – the involvement of human beings as financial deciders and concealers. The situation closely mirrors Rosemary Vrablic’s relationship to Donald Trump, in which a private banker again protected their client despite clear signs of criminality.

It is all, at the very least, incredibly infuriating. Jamie Dimon pointing to crypto as some malevolent force, when his own company hand-held one of the greatest monsters of this or any generation, is the grimmest form of elite hypocrisy, the kind of thing you do when you know you’ll never be held accountable.

More substantively, crypto is a useful distraction from the many, many crimes in which Morgan and other banks are implicated, again and again, in a ceaseless drumbeat. Even if Elizabeth Warren is completely sincere in her newfound belief that crypto is the real villian in the contemporary story, rather than the bankers she made her name attacking, she is serving as a useful idiot for people like Dimon.