Senate Democrats are gearing up to investigate JPMorgan Chase‘s banking relationship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein once they take control of Congress early next year.
Democratic staffers on the Senate Finance Committee intend to home in on how high-ranking executives at JPMorgan handled Epstein, a source familiar with the panel’s thinking told CNBC on Thursday. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the probe of the nation’s biggest bank has not been announced.
The Finance Committee is likely to be chaired beginning in January by Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who currently is the panel’s ranking member. Wyden has made clear he plans to make full use of the subpoena powers that committee majorities wield.
Democratic staffers aim to focus in particular on decisions about Epstein made by Mary Callahan Erdoes, the CEO of JPMorgan’s asset and wealth management division, the source said.
JPMorgan did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the planned investigation.
In a 2023 deposition, Erdoes said she was aware as early as 2006 that Epstein was accused of paying cash to have underage girls brought to his home. Epstein had been a client of the bank since 1998.
Epstein became a registered sex offender after pleading guilty in 2008 in Florida to a state criminal charge of procuring an underage girl for prostitution.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon in his own, later deposition in 2023, said Erdoes had authority to cut off Epstein as a client. She did not take that step until 2013.
Epstein, a former friend of President Donald Trump, ex-President Bill Clinton and many other high-profile people, died in a jailhouse suicide in August 2019, weeks after being arrested on federal child sex trafficking charges.
A lawyer for the U.S. Virgin Islands told a federal judge in New York in 2023 that JPMorgan “was a full-service bank for Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking,” and that it waited until after he killed himself to notify the Treasury Department of $1 billion in suspicious transactions related to trafficking by Epstein.
“This was a CYA [cover your a–] reporting after 16 years of all of the monies flowing in his JPMorgan accounts after he was dead,” the lawyer, Mimi Liu, said.
JPMorgan has blamed former investment banking chief Jes Staley for concealing or failing to report criminal activity related to Epstein, with whom he had a close relationship.
Staley, who left JPMorgan in 2013 and later became CEO of Barclays before stepping down in 2021, has denied knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
House Oversight Chair James Comer, R-Ky., after a closed-door interview with Staley in July, said that the former executive had encouraged JPMorgan to keep Epstein as a client.
In mid-2023, JPMorgan agreed to a $290 million settlement with victims of Epstein without admitting wrongdoing. That same year, JPMorgan agreed to pay $75 million to settle a separate lawsuit by the U.S. Virgin Islands alleging that the bank facilitated and benefited from the sex trafficking of young women by Epstein.
In August, Wyden released a report accusing top officials at multiple banks of “looking the other way” as Epstein moved hundreds of millions of dollars to finance a yearslong sex trafficking operation.
“The report exposes how top bankers shielded Epstein from federal scrutiny by delaying the reporting of Epstein’s suspicious financial activity to the U.S. government, likely in violation of federal anti-money-laundering laws,” Wyden’s office said in a statement that month.
“It includes new details about the extent of suspicious activity reported by Deutsche Bank after Epstein’s death, new details from bank reports filed about suspicious transfers to Epstein through accounts at Bank of America, and names top officials at JPMorgan Chase and other banks who were responsible for reporting Epstein’s shady activities to the government but instead protected Epstein in order to gain access to Leon Black and other billionaires.”
Black, former CEO of Apollo Global Management, was revealed to have paid Epstein $158 million for financial advice in the years after his 2008 conviction.
In September, Black sued the House oversight panel, seeking to block subpoenas it had issued him for his testimony and for documents related to its Epstein probe.
On Wednesday, Black sued Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., who is poised to become chair of the Oversight Committee in the next Congress, alleging Garcia defamed him in statements regarding Epstein. The lawsuit focuses on Garcia’s claims in a TV interview that Black “is at the center of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes” and “was one of the last people to actually interact” with Epstein before his death, among others.
The Department of Justice’s mountain of files related to Epstein became a major focus in late 2025 and early 2026, after Congress passed a bill ordering the DOJ to make those records public.
Trump’s name is referenced thousands of times in the files that have been released.
The president has not been charged with any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, with whom he fell out in the early 2000s.
