Open Letter to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer, It Is Time to Identify the “Wall Street Financiers” in the Epstein Files

BY SRH

In a letter dated August 31, you requested that all Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) submitted by financial institutions “in reference to or relating to Mr. Jeffrey Epstein and/or Ghislaine Maxwell” be made public by September 15, at the latest.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi was previously written to by Senator Ron Wyden, Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee, in a letter dated July 21. Your letter of August 31 followed that letter. Senator Wyden discloses in his letter that staff members from both the Senate Finance Committee and the White House were granted access to review the SARs documents you requested from the US Treasury earlier this year, but were not authorized to make copies. The writings of Senator Wyden

Thousands of pages of Treasury Department records detailing the movement of funds into and out of Jeffrey Epstein’s accounts were reviewed behind closed doors by the bipartisan staff of the Senate Finance Committee on February 14, 2024. There is a wealth of evidence regarding the funding sources for Epstein’s sex trafficking operations in the Epstein file kept by the Treasury Department. Darren Indyke, Harry Beller, Richard Kahn, and Erika Kellerhals were among the associates of Jeffrey Epstein who were involved in over 4,725 wire transfers totaling $1.08 billion between 2003 and 2019, according to one document in the Treasury Department’s Epstein file. Additionally, Epstein’s dossier at the Treasury Department outlines the hundreds of millions of dollars that Wall Street bankers paid him…

The use of the plural form of the phrase “Wall Street financiers” by Senator Wyden needs your close attention. Leon Black, who Senator Wyden confirmed moved $170 million to Epstein’s accounts, is the only Wall Street financier to date to be publicly identified as having wired large sums to accounts associated with Epstein.

Apollo Global Management, a private equity business heavily involved with Wall Street, was founded and was previously headed by Black. To settle charges involving Epstein, Black paid the U.S. Virgin Islands $62.5 million. The claims included that Black’s financial support for Epstein enabled the sex trafficking business to remain operational. Rape of a minor, reportedly committed in Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, is one of several sexual abuse allegations leveled against Black by several women.

It is long past due that the American people are informed of the names of any other Wall Street financiers that the US government knows to have supported or been involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of minors, and that federal prosecutions commence without delay.

Many young people’s lives would have turned out differently if the Justice Department had brought the 60-count charge against Epstein in 2007 and sentenced him to the decades-long jail term he truly deserved.

On April 15, 2021, the 11th Circuit Appellate Court delivered a harsh ruling after reviewing the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein case and its neglect to apprise his victims of its cunning non-prosecution arrangement. “The court wrote:”

Based on what we know, the circumstances of this case are more than shocking; they reveal a story of national shame.

“Ms. Wild was one of more than thirty minors sexually assaulted by wealthy and influential banker Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplices from 1999 to 2007 in Palm Beach, Florida and other locations across the US and the world. Epstein had his workers scout for and bring him girls, some of them were under the age of fifteen. After Epstein obtained the girls, he subjected them to sexual abuse either himself or allowed others to do so. To encourage more people to join his ring, Epstein even paid bounties to some of his victims.

In an official document dated July 7, the Justice Department verified that “…Epstein harmed over one thousand victims,” contradicting the current president’s claims that the Epstein scandal is “a hoax,” in an effort to deflect the public’s justifiable outrage and request for truthful answers. Their individual traumas were distinct.

The American people currently know that, aside from Leon Black, the only other person officially identified as donating enormous wealth to Epstein is Leslie Wexner, who is emphatically not a Wall Street banker. Wexner is a retailing millionaire from New Albany, Ohio. He was previously the Chairman and CEO of L Brands, which controlled Abercrombie & Fitch, Victoria’s Secret, Lane Bryant, Bath & Body Works, and many more. When Epstein passed away on August 10, 2019, his assets, which originated from Wexner, were valued at more than $100 million.

Two independent investigative reports on Wexner’s interactions with Epstein have been added to the mass of classified records pertaining to Epstein and his money men that the American people still have not seen. Those reports are necessary for a more complete understanding of Wexner’s role with Epstein.

After Epstein’s 2019 arrest on federal sex trafficking charges brought light to their tight relationship, the Board of Directors of L Brands contacted the big law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell to investigate the ties between Epstein and Wexner. Abigail Wexner was an attorney at Davis Polk before she married Wexner, and the firm had served as the company’s outside counsel for many years. L Brands retained Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to do a second investigation following a shareholder’s lawsuit alleging that Davis Polk lacked sufficient impartiality in the case.

Despite the fact that publicly-traded firms usually file and make public major outside counsel investigations like this, the fact that Wexner’s contact with Epstein was the subject of two legal reviews remains a dark secret.

We requested the outside counsel reports prepared by Davis Polk and Wachtell in 2023 through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we made with the SEC. The SEC informed us by email on August 23, 2023, that we would not be receiving any papers in response to our FOIA request. The following were the grounds on which the SEC refused to provide us with pertinent information:

“We are unable to provide you with a definitive answer about the records that you have requested. Recognizing the presence of such records may infringe upon the personal privacy safeguards offered by FOIA Exemptions…Disclosure of this information would be an obviously unjustified violation of privacy under Exemption 6.

A federal entity responsible for protecting the stability of the American market would never respond with such a false statement. Apollo Global Management, the company that employed Leon Black, had no qualms about releasing a report detailing Black’s ties to and enormous payments to Jeffrey Epstein, which had been prepared by Dechert, the firm’s outside counsel, and filed with the SEC. Now that Senator Wyden has discovered that Dechert’s report omitted $12 million in Black-to-Epstein funds, the total understood to be $170 million.

The Manhattan mansion where scores of minors have claimed sexual assault or rape was given to Epstein by Wexner. It is undeniable that the Boeing 727 that Epstein eventually acquired was formerly held by a business associated with Wexner. The sex trafficking of minors was also said to have taken place there.

One of Epstein’s adolescent sex slaves, Virginia Giuffre, who committed suicide in April, made allegations that Epstein had repeatedly trafficked her for sex to Wexner in a deposition she delivered under oath in 2016. According to her deposition, she gave the FBI the names of others who saw the encounters and gave them the information. But according to a memo from July 7th, “We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties,” according to the Obama administration.

The refusal of the Justice Department to file the 60-count charge against Epstein in 2007 is just as “national disgraceful” as that assertion.

The U.S. Department of Justice ought to prioritize criminal prosecution of JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the country, for its money laundering for Epstein, according to the U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General’s office. This is what the legal complaint said against the bank, which JPMorgan Chase settled for $75 million in 2023 to keep out of the public eye:

According to the report, JP Morgan was crucial to the running and cover-up of the Epstein trafficking enterprise because it “knowingly, negligently, and unlawfully” provided and pulled the levers that paid the recruiters and victims.A criminal operation whose currency was the sexual slavery of dozens of women and girls in and beyond the Virgin Islands was exposed when JP Morgan enabled and camouflaged wire and cash transfers. The primary focus of Epstein’s accounts at JP Morgan was human trafficking.

In 2014, the Justice Department levied two felony offenses against JPMorgan Chase for allegedly turning a blind eye to Bernie Madoff’s blatant money laundering within the bank. Even though the bank informed UK authorities that it suspected Madoff of running a Ponzi scheme, it did not submit the required Suspicious Activity Reports to the US. As it turns out, JPMorgan Chase ignored Jeffrey Epstein’s money laundering that enabled sexual assaults on girls as young as fourteen years old, all the while helping Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, which affected thousands of victims.

According to prosecution documents, JPMorgan Chase was Epstein’s principal bank; they wired him hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, provided him with physical cash, and extended a $50 million line of credit. Countless accounts pertaining to Epstein were kept by JPMorgan Chase. A 23-year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), Shaun O’Neill, wrote an expert opinion that we found in court records. In it, O’Neill claimed that JPMorgan Chase had “impeded” the federal criminal investigation into Epstein.

William Langford, an anti-money-laundering (AML) executive at JPMorgan Chase, had previously worked for the U.S. Treasury’s FinCEN, the agency where SARs are filed. The document discloses, among other things, that O’Neill, a former FBI agent, was permitted to read the full deposition given in the case.

Although the relationship has been reported to have begun in 1998 by major news outlets, O’Neill claims that Langford stated in his deposition that Epstein became a client of JPMorgan in 1985. If Langford is right, JPMorgan Chase possesses Epstein’s financial transaction records going back 40 years. This would shed light on who gave him the initial seed money and who has been his biggest financial backer throughout the years.

As of October 18, 2007, JPMorgan Chase has coded accounts at the bank as “Epstein related” according to an internal document that the bank submitted with the court. See information starting on page 21 of the 29th. Among these accounts are those of Epstein’s clients, even though a joint document from the DOJ and the FBI informed the public that no such list of clients exists. The opening date of the account is also shown in the table. Leslie Wexner is the recipient of an early account pertaining to Epstein. On March 9, 2000, it was made public. On January 21, 1999, Epstein was appointed as Trustee of a trust for the children of Wexner.

The House Oversight Committee must extend its subpoenas to JPMorgan Chase if it desires to be seriously considered in its examination of the sex trafficking ring and its funding that was run by Epstein.