Senate Democrats Plan Probe of JPMorgan's Ties to Jeffrey Epstein After Taking Control

Senate Democrats are preparing to investigate JPMorgan Chase's banking relationship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein once they assume control of Congress early next year.

Democratic staffers on the Senate Finance Committee plan to examine how senior executives at the nation's largest bank handled Epstein as a client, a source familiar with the panel's thinking told CNBC on Thursday. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation has not been publicly announced.

The Finance Committee is expected to be led starting in January by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the panel's current ranking Democrat. Wyden has signaled that he intends to make full use of the subpoena powers available to the committee majority.

Staffers intend to focus in particular on decisions involving Epstein made by Mary Callahan Erdoes, chief executive of JPMorgan's asset and wealth management division, the source said. JPMorgan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a 2023 deposition, Erdoes said she knew as early as 2006 that Epstein was accused of paying cash to have underage girls brought to his home. Epstein had been a JPMorgan client since 1998, and he became a registered sex offender after pleading guilty in Florida in 2008 to a state charge of procuring an underage girl for prostitution. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in his own 2023 deposition that Erdoes had the authority to sever ties with Epstein, a step she did not take until 2013.

Epstein, who once counted President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton and other prominent figures among his associates, died in a jailhouse suicide in August 2019, weeks after his arrest 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," saying the bank waited until after his death to alert the Treasury Department to $1 billion in suspicious transactions. "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 its former investment banking chief Jes Staley for concealing or failing to report Epstein-related criminal activity. Staley, who left the bank in 2013 and later resigned as Barclays CEO in 2021, has denied knowledge of Epstein's crimes. House Oversight Chair James Comer, R-Ky., said after a closed-door interview with Staley in July that the former executive had encouraged JPMorgan to retain Epstein as a client. In mid-2023, JPMorgan agreed to pay $290 million to settle claims by Epstein's victims without admitting wrongdoing, and separately paid $75 million to settle a U.S. Virgin Islands lawsuit alleging the bank facilitated and profited from Epstein's trafficking of young women.

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 fund a years-long sex trafficking operation. His office said the report detailed how bankers delayed reporting Epstein's suspicious financial activity, likely violating federal anti-money-laundering laws, and named officials at JPMorgan and other banks who protected Epstein to gain access to billionaires such as Leon Black. Black, the former Apollo Global Management CEO, paid Epstein $158 million for financial advice after his 2008 conviction. Black sued the House oversight panel in September to block subpoenas and, on Wednesday, sued Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., for defamation over statements about Epstein.

The Justice Department's Epstein files became a major focus in late 2025 and early 2026 after Congress ordered their release. Trump's name appears thousands of times in the released records, though the president, who fell out with Epstein in the early 2000s, has not been charged with any wrongdoing in connection with him.