Follow the Money: How Wall Street Bankrolled Epstein, and How the Trump Administration and CBS are Blocking The Truth
For nearly two decades, Jeffrey Epstein moved more than a billion dollars through some of the biggest banks in America. He withdrew millions in unexplained cash. He wired money to women in Russia, Belarus, and Turkmenistan. He paid his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell more than $30 million. And at every step, the banks that processed these transactions either failed to notice or chose to look away.
That is the conclusion of a new investigative report from Senator Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, released this week after a three-year investigation. The report, titled “Looking the Other Way: How Wall Street Banks Enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s Sex Trafficking,” lays out in granular detail how JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America processed Epstein’s money for years without reporting it to federal regulators as required by law. But the more damning story is what happened after Wyden’s staff started asking questions: the Trump Administration and Senate Republicans moving to shut the investigation down before it could go further.
The money trail
Epstein’s relationship with Wall Street began at JPMorgan Chase, where he and his associates held 134 different accounts between 1998 and 2013. Over that period, more than $1 billion moved through those accounts. JPMorgan withdrew or flagged more than $7 million in physical cash on Epstein’s behalf, over $3 million in direct payments to women, and more than $30 million to Maxwell alone, some of it used to buy her a helicopter.
Internally, JPMorgan knew exactly who it was banking. A 2009 due diligence report noted Epstein “was convicted of a felony charge in 2008” and was “well known” to senior private bank employees. By 2008, the bank had designated him a high-risk client because of his ties to human trafficking and underage prostitution. None of that stopped the money from flowing. Epstein was part of an elite tier of clients JPMorgan internally called the “Wall of Cash,” and decisions about keeping him as a client were made by executives who reported directly to CEO Jamie Dimon.
JPMorgan finally terminated Epstein as a client in 2013, citing the “repetitive nature” of his cash transactions and the regulatory risk of his personal history. But the bank did not report the suspicious activity to the Treasury Department until 2019, six years later, and only after Epstein’s arrest on federal sex trafficking charges made the delay impossible to ignore. When JPMorgan finally filed, it flagged more than 5,000 wire transfers totaling $1.3 billion, nearly 300 times the value of everything it had reported while Epstein was alive and banking there.
After Epstein was pushed out, Deutsche Bank took him on as a client and kept him until his death in 2019. The same pattern repeated. Deutsche Bank retroactively flagged more than $250 million in suspicious wire transfers only after Epstein’s arrest, despite internal compliance staff documenting Epstein’s attorney, Darren Indyke, asking bank employees how often he could withdraw cash “without creating some sort of alert.” Deutsche Bank ultimately paid $150 million to New York regulators for what the state called “significant compliance failures,” but it never faced a federal enforcement action.
Then there is Bank of America, which handled $170 million in wire transfers from billionaire Leon Black to Epstein between 2012 and 2017, ostensibly for tax and estate planning advice. Epstein was not a licensed tax advisor. Bank of America did not flag the transfers as suspicious until February 2020, nearly eight months after Epstein’s arrest and up to seven years after the money moved, eventually admitting the “wire transfer activity does not have a verifiable business purpose.” According to Wyden’s investigators, Black provided roughly 90 percent of Epstein’s income during that five-year window, and in a settlement with the U.S. Virgin Islands, Black admitted Epstein used the money to help fund his trafficking operation there.
The executives who knew
What makes the report land harder than a routine compliance failure story is the paper trail showing how personal these relationships were at the top of these banks. Mary Erdoes, now JPMorgan’s CEO of Asset and Wealth Management, exchanged years of warm, familiar emails with Epstein, including wishing him happy birthday and apologizing when she couldn’t make his calls because she was in meetings with Dimon. In 2012, JPMorgan’s then-CFO for Asset and Wealth Management emailed Erdoes describing another client’s house as more tasteful than Epstein’s and having “fewer nymphettes.” Erdoes’s reply: “Wow.”
Jes Staley, then head of JPMorgan’s investment bank, exchanged more than 1,200 emails with Epstein and was a frequent visitor to his properties. In one email sent weeks before Epstein asked a young woman to pose in a Snow White costume for photos, Staley wrote to him, “That was fun. Say hello to Snow White.” In another, sent after Epstein had just gotten out of prison for soliciting a minor, Staley wrote he “realized the danger” in emailing Epstein but wanted to give him “a long, heartfelt hug.”
Internal compliance staff tried repeatedly to cut Epstein off. One described him bluntly as “scum” and a “known child sleaze” in 2010, warning that keeping him as a client undermined the bank’s own human trafficking initiative. They were overruled. According to CEO Jamie Dimon’s own sworn deposition, the final call on keeping Epstein as a client rested with the bank’s general counsel, who repeatedly signed off on retaining him.
Even after JPMorgan formally cut Epstein loose in 2013, Erdoes personally approved continuing to work with him informally so he could keep functioning as an introduction to Leon Black and other billionaires. “That’s OK right?” one executive asked her in an email about routing business through Epstein. Erdoes responded with a single letter: “Y.”
No consequences
Despite all of this, almost nobody involved has faced any professional or financial consequence. Erdoes remains employed at JPMorgan, where her total compensation this year, including a newly disclosed $20 million retention bonus, will exceed $50 million. Justin Nelson, the JPMorgan banker who kept meeting with Epstein at his townhouse and ranch years after his official exit from the bank to chase Leon Black’s business, still runs a JPMorgan private bank team in Connecticut. Mary Casey is now Vice Chair of JPMorgan’s private bank. Jane Heller and Karen Weiss, the Bank of America bankers who oversaw Black’s account and waved through his payments to Epstein, remain employed there managing portfolios for other ultra-wealthy clients. Of everyone named in the report, only Jes Staley has faced real consequences, forced out as CEO of Barclays and investigated by British regulators, and that had nothing to do with U.S. enforcement.
The Trump Administration angle
This is where the report stops being a story about bank compliance and becomes a story about obstruction. Over three years, Wyden asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent three separate times, in March, June, and September of 2025, to hand over the full set of Epstein-related suspicious activity reports housed at the Treasury Department. Each time, Bessent’s office acknowledged the request and then declined to produce the records. In January 2026, Treasury confirmed it had already handed the same files over to the House Oversight Committee, which Republicans control, while continuing to withhold them from Wyden’s Senate Finance Committee.
At a public appearance, Bessent brushed off the request, saying the department’s “job is simply to collect the reports.” That is not true. Treasury and FinCEN regularly investigate and penalize banks for BSA violations, including a $1.3 billion fine against TD Bank and a $390 million fine against Capital One in recent years. Bessent’s own department has aggressively pursued fraud investigations in Minnesota this year. It has shown no comparable urgency toward the banks that financed Epstein’s trafficking for two decades.
When Wyden tried to force the issue legislatively with the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act, requiring Treasury to hand the records to Congress on a bipartisan basis, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo personally blocked it from passing by unanimous consent on the Senate floor. Wyden also reached out repeatedly, starting in June 2024, to Senator Marcia Blackburn, a Republican who has spent years publicly demanding Epstein transparency, seeking her support for a bipartisan subpoena. Her office never gave a clear answer and never responded to a direct request to co-sponsor the bill. Blackburn continued making public statements about being “stonewalled by Democrats” on Epstein while privately declining every opportunity Wyden’s office offered her to actually do something about it.
The banks followed the administration’s lead. Bank of America told Wyden it would not cooperate absent a subpoena. JPMorgan sent Wyden a letter blaming its entire Epstein failure on one former executive, Jes Staley, and claiming every other current and former executive “acted with integrity,” a claim the unsealed documents in Wyden’s own report directly contradict. When Wyden followed up with two dozen more questions, JPMorgan refused to answer any of them and pointed him back to public court filings. Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan both refused to turn over a deposition transcript from Paul Morris, the banker who managed Epstein’s accounts at both institutions. BNY Mellon refused to cooperate at all.
Even the press has run into resistance. Wyden sat for a taped interview in March 2026 with then-60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi about this exact investigation. Shortly after the taping, CBS News leadership under Bari Weiss fired Alfonsi. The interview has not aired, and it remains unclear whether the broader segment on Wall Street’s role in Epstein’s crimes will ever run.
The bottom line
Strip away the bank jargon and the pattern is simple. Wall Street banks had years of warning signs, internal staff flagging Epstein by name, and they kept the money moving because Epstein was profitable and connected to other billionaires. When the bill finally came due in the form of lawsuits, the banks and Epstein’s estate paid out more than $900 million in settlements, avoiding depositions of people like Leon Black and the executives who oversaw his accounts. Nobody at the senior executive level has faced criminal charges. And now, when a sitting senator tries to get the underlying government records that could finally answer who else knew what and when, the Trump Treasury Department is sitting on them, Senate Republicans are blocking the bill that would force their release, and the one journalist who tried to put it on national television lost her job days after the interview was taped.
Wyden’s report ends with a list of recommendations: investigations from Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the Comptroller of the Currency, a full DOJ criminal probe, subpoenas from House Oversight for the bankers named in the report, and new legislation requiring annual compliance attestations and clawbacks for banks that fail ultra-wealthy clients. None of that happens without the records Bessent is refusing to hand over. Follow the money is supposed to be the first rule of any investigation into Epstein. Right now, the people with the power to actually do that are the ones standing in the way.
This story was originally published by MeidasTouch on Aug 4, 2026, where it first appeared in the News section. Add MeidasTouch as a Preferred Source by clicking here.