Greg Olear
Was Jamie Dimon, the longtime CEO of JP Morgan Chase, in the know about his company’s long and profitable relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? Or did the buck stop with his then-No. 2, James Edward “Jes” Staley? Because one of them, apparently, is playing fast and loose with the truth. What we know for sure is that Epstein was a big macher at his favorite bank. We know he helped the firm land other wealthy clients. Per the investigation of Senator Wyden, we know that over a 15-year period, JPM processed over a billion dollars—that’s billion with a “b”—in transactions across the late pedophile’s 134 JPM accounts that the bank retroactively flagged as suspicious. That’s $1,282,799,188 in sketchy transactions; Mammon only knows how much money passed through those accounts in total. And we know that top JPM executives knew damned well who and what Epstein was. What we don’t know for certain is if Jamie Dimon, JPM’s top banana, was among those executives in the know. He claimed, in a sworn deposition in May 2023, that he was not. And, because people in the media and in Washington tend to like Dimon, and because he didn’t hide behind his high-priced attorneys during questioning, and because perjury is a serious crime—albeit not one the last three Attorneys General have shown much of an interest in prosecuting, especially if the false witness is a rich and powerful white guy—everyone has pretty much taken him at his word. But last month, at a closed Congressional hearing, Jes Staley—who before leaving the firm to head up Barclays was Dimon’s heir apparent, as well as JP Morgan’s primary liaison with the notorious child sex trafficker—claimed that he hipped his boss “on several occasions about criminal investigations into their client Jeffrey Epstein.” That seems to contradict what Dimon said at his own deposition. As I see it, there are three possibilities here: 1) Jes Staley is full of shit. 2) Jamie Dimon is full of shit. 3) Both men are pretty much telling the truth. Which is it? Let’s examine the case for each: https://gregolear.substack.com/p/pretty-much-jamie-jes-jeffrey-and
