Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) was in Bend this week, holding a press conference with local elected officials to express dismay over the federal government’s handling of fire management and public forests. Considering that the smoke map of the greater Northwest is currently glowing bright red due to all of the fires in the region, it’s clear that fire prevention and management efforts need all the attention they can get, this year and in future years.
But that’s hardly Wyden’s only headache at the moment. He’s also pitted himself against a number of big banks, alleging in a new report that the banks looked the other way for years while Jeffrey Epstein moved money related to his rampant human trafficking of young women and girls.
According to the Aug. 4 report prepared by Wyden’s office, big banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America, “looked the other way as Epstein withdrew millions of dollars in cash with no clear business purpose and was party to thousands of suspicious wire transfers worth more than $1 billion.”
The report alleges that the banks failed to appropriately investigate the more than $170 million in payments made from billionaire Leon Black to Epstein — even, in the case of JPMorgan Chase, when internal compliance staff issued warnings about the payments. Black was “overwhelmingly the largest source of funding for Epstein’s sex trafficking,” according to the report. Then, the report alleges, the bank waited years to report the activity to financial regulators. Banks are required to file reports of suspicious activity within 30 days of initial detection.
What’s more, Wyden sat for an interview with 60 Minutes back in March to share the findings of his report. The interview was killed by CBS leadership, Wyden’s report alleges. This week, Wyden went public with his own report, which was covered by numerous news outlets around the country. Suppressing a story like this was not going to keep the matter under wraps for long.
Getting Congress to act on the banking matter at the present moment, with a Republican majority that lives in fear of President Trump, doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen. But should the midterm elections change the balance of the Senate, Wyden may very well find himself chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance (on which he currently sits as Ranking Member), allowing him to initiate a full investigation. Democrats need to turn four Senate seats from red to blue to gain control of the chamber, according to NPR, and it’s hardly a foregone conclusion that they’ll do so.
Voting out members of the U.S. Senate in swing states is one way to see the investigation into big banks’ complicity in the Epstein case actually move forward. But there’s also an option that turns the personal, political: If the misdeeds of the Great Recession didn’t already prompt the average person to move to local banks and credit unions, perhaps the fact that some of those same banks covered up for a wealthy predator finally will. Think globally, act locally.
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