On 7 July, the Justice Department and FBI announced that billionaire Jeffrey “Epstein harmed over one thousand victims” – mostly young females, many of them underage.

But those thousand victims vanished when President Trump announced the Epstein scandal was a “hoax” and a conspiracy by the Democratic Party.

Happily, neither Congress nor the media have kowtowed to Trump’s order to “move along, nothing to see here”. Trump’s credibility has already taken a wallop from his Epstein connection and cover-up but far worse damage could be around the next bend.

Last week, The New York Times delivered the “ full story of how America’s leading lender enabled the century’s most notorious sexual predator”. JPMorgan Bank continued assisting Epstein’s crime sprees long after he pled guilty and spent time in prison for soliciting a minor for prostitution. That sentence was part of a sweetheart deal that involved granting him and all his co-conspirators immunity for all federal charges.

Epstein’s case exemplifies how federal law doesn’t apply to the financial elite. In 1970, Congress enacted the Bank Secrecy Act, making it a crime for banks to keep secrets from the government. Banks were required to file a federal report for any cash transaction exceeding US$10,000. The IRS has devastated many small businesses for inadvertently violating that law, as I detailed on Sunday in a New York Post piece.

Epstein was pulling out $800,000 in cash each year from the bank, “much of which was used to procure girls and young women”, the Times details. Shortly after Epstein’s death in a New York prison cell, in late 2019, JPMorgan “filed a report with federal regulators that retroactively flagged as suspicious some 4700 Epstein transactions – totalling more than US$1.1 billion”. Banks are obliged to make such reports within 60 days of the suspicious activity but JPMorgan was 17 years late with some of those reports. Never mind.

Those financial crime potential alerts included “hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to Russian banks and young Eastern European women” brought to the US, according to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR). But Epstein never paid a cent in penalties for the belatedly reported squirrelly dealings that would have doomed average Americans if the IRS targeted them.

Epstein used a US$7.4 million transfer from his JPMorgan account “to buy a green Sikorsky helicopter to fly people to Little Saint James”, his private island in the US Virgin Islands. The Times noted that JPMorgan “was supporting important cogs in Epstein’s sex-trafficking machinery. On the island, Epstein would compel teenage girls and young women to give him nude massages and have sex with him”. JPMorgan has paid more than US$350 million to settle lawsuit claims from Epstein victims.

After Epstein served time for his child sex crime, JPMorgan paid him US$9 million in 2011. “The fact that he remained a client in good standing conferred on him respectability and helped him foster new ties to corporate elites,” the Times noted. After his prison term, Epstein helped arrange a meeting between “JPMorgan’s investment bankers in Israel” and Bibi Netanyahu. Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, was the daughter of legendary Mossad operative and British publisher Robert Maxwell.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) are leading the push for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a congressional edict that would compel federal agencies to speedily disclose all they have on Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The White House is fighting tooth-and-nail to block their resolution.

Last week, Senator Wyden introduced the _Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act_  to compel Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to give Senate investigators the Suspicious Activity Reports tied to Epstein and his co-conspirators within 30 days. Wyden notes that those files “detail Epstein transactions totalling at least US$1.5 billion, and they include the names of women and girls he may have trafficked, as well as the identities of individuals whose involvement with Epstein may put them at risk of blackmail or other foreign corruption”. Wyden commented: “In this era of misinformation, these reports are the coin of the realm.” Wyden and his staffers have been pursuing the Epstein case for more than three years.

Uncovering the sources and beneficiaries of Epstein’s tainted windfalls could break the dam on the scandal. Trump’s Justice Department is seeking to stonewall all further disclosures by touting their devotion to protecting Epstein’s underage victims. But there are plenty of ways to disclose damning information without re-tormenting those females.

The Trump administration is using shameless pretexts to withhold a vast trove on Epstein’s crime sprees just like the Biden administration covered up racketeering by the Biden crime family. A 2023 House Oversight Committee analysis exposed “ the Biden family’s pattern of courting business in regions of the world in which the then vice- president had an outsize role and influenced US policy”. The Committee asserts the Bidens and their associates “established a network of over 20 companies” that collected at least US$10 million from abroad. “The Bidens took steps to hide, confuse and conceal payments they received from foreign nationals,” the Committee reported. Banks and other entities filed 170 suspicious-activity reports tied to foreign payments the Biden family or their associates allegedly received. But the Treasury Department blocked congressional access to the Biden dirt.

Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, declared, “The basic question here is whether a bunch of rich paedophiles and Epstein accomplices are going to face any consequences for their crimes, and Scott Bessent is doing his best to make sure they won’t.” Are federal banking laws mere pretences to empower prosecutors to punish wayward citizens as they please while letting the biggest and richest violators skate free?

The New York Times’ bombshell last week focused primarily on JPMorgan’s inside operations. Can members of Congress deliver a similar blockbuster on the Epstein-related conniving in the White House, the Treasury Department, and other federal agencies? Can Congress compel disclosure of why Epstein and all his co-conspirators were given blanket federal immunity in 2007 for their sex crimes?

Trump’s Epstein shenanigans are draining his support from MAGA. How many more disclosures of items such as Trump’s birthday card can his credibility survive? And will disclosing Epstein’s dirt finally explain why some US politicians have scorned America’s national interest?

An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.

Republished from CounterPunch, 18 September 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.