by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall St On Parade:
On March 15, 2022, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a Memorandum to the heads of executive departments and to federal agencies mandating how they were to handle Freedom of Information Act requests. Garland wrote:
“For more than fifty years, the Freedom of lnformation Act (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. § 552, has been a vital tool for ensuring transparency, accessibility, and accountability in government. As the Supreme Court has explained, the Act’s ‘basic purpose … is to ensure an informed citizenry,’ which is ‘vital to the functioning of a democratic society [and] needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.’ NLRB v. Robbins Tire & Rubber Co., 437 U.S. 214,242 (1978).”
Despite this laudable endorsement of FOIA by the Biden administration’s top law enforcement officer, the Securities and Exchange Commission under Chair Gary Gensler is drawing a dark curtain around a case of critical public interest and importance to the American people in rooting out ingrained and systemic corruption on Wall Street.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Wall Street On Parade is a public interest financial news site which has already devoted months of research into bringing in-depth reports on this matter to the public’s attention. But despite this, the taxpayer-supported SEC is refusing to provide Wall Street On Parade with even a shred of paper in response to our FOIA request.
The case involves the more than 15 years that the taxpayer-backstopped Wall Street mega bank, JPMorgan Chase, was making 9,000 money transactions totaling $2.4 billion and providing hundreds of thousands of dollars in hard cash annually to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein – knowing full well for much of that time that Epstein was a Level 3 Registered Sex Offender and was credibly alleged by the Palm Beach County Police Department (supported with videotaped victim testimony) to have sexually assaulted dozens of underage schoolgirls, paying them $200 to $1,000 in hard cash after each encounter to stay quiet.
Making JPMorgan Chase’s position even more indefensible, internal documents obtained during discovery in federal lawsuits show that the bank held accounts not just for Epstein, but for his accomplices, procurers of underage girls, and victims. The bank casually moved money from Epstein into these accounts on a regular basis.
According to internal documents and depositions in the federal lawsuit brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands against JPMorgan Chase for “actively participating in Epstein’s sex trafficking venture,” the bank conducted a secret internal investigation into bank employees’ relationship with Epstein. It dubbed the internal investigation “Project JEEP.” (The JE was for Jeffrey and the EP was for Epstein.) That internal investigation turned up hundreds of highly incriminating emails showing the nauseatingly sycophantic relationship that bank executives maintained with Epstein. (See a partial listing of 260 of those emails here.)
As the JPMorgan Chase executives were falling over themselves to curry favor with Epstein and get client referrals, the compliance, anti-money laundering and human trafficking personnel inside the bank were referring to Epstein in their own internal emails as a “known child sleaze,” “that scum Epstein” while another acknowledged that he was aware that Epstein had stocked his mansion with “nymphettes.”
According to court documents, JPMorgan Chase conducted Project JEEP in 2019, the same year that Epstein was arrested and criminally charged by the Department of Justice for child sex trafficking and his ties to Wall Street figures began to make headlines in newspapers that JPMorgan cares about, i.e., the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. (Epstein died in jail on August 10, 2019, a little more than a month after his arrest. The Medical Examiner ruled it a suicide.) The bank thus became fully aware in 2019 that it had serious legal liability over its relationship with Epstein; that one of its executives had received sexually suggestive photos from Epstein; and that the same executive had visited Epstein in jail while he was doing time for sex with a minor in Palm Beach County.
The bank also likely learned of its potential liability for funneling more than $5 million in hard cash to Epstein – much of which was used to perpetuate his international sex trafficking ring according to the U.S. Virgin Islands, while failing to file the legally mandated Suspicious Activity Reports.
According to the SEC, form 8K must be filed with the SEC by a publicly-traded company to announce major events that shareholders should know about. Companies, typically, have just four days to make the 8K filing after becoming aware of the event.
We could find no record of JPMorgan Chase ever filing an 8K report with the SEC in 2019, or in any year since, that shares its Project JEEP internal report with shareholders and the public.
The U.S. Virgin Islands’ lawsuit is providing some transparency on what transpired with Epstein inside the five-count felon JPMorgan Chase. But, aside from news reports and a breathtaking, nonfiction book of criminal intrigue, One Nation Under Blackmail, by Whitney Webb, connecting members of the JPMorgan Chase Board of Directors and its predecessor bank (Banc One), to Epstein and one of his largest clients, Leslie Wexner, and to crime families and Israeli intelligence operations, there has been a tight lid on the deeper facts involving the Wexner connection.
Leslie Wexner is the former longtime Chairman and CEO of The Limited (a/k/a L Brands) retailing chain which, at various times, included Abercrombie & Fitch, Victoria’s Secret, Lane Bryant, Bath & Body Works and others.
Epstein functioned as a financial advisor to Wexner and held a power of attorney for Wexner’s financial interests from approximately 1986 to at least 2008. Epstein’s Boeing 727, which was referred to as the “Lolita Express,” had been a corporate asset of The Limited. Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion in Manhattan came from Wexner. According to Epstein’s victims who have come forward, both the 727 and the Manhattan mansion were used to facilitate sexual assaults on underage girls. Prosecutors found a safe full of photos of naked girls, hundreds of which appeared to be underage, when the Manhattan mansion was raided by the FBI in 2019.
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