Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase
As the attention of Americans is focused on surviving the pandemic and the pivotal presidential debate tonight, William Barr’s Justice Department decided to quietly hand an early Christmas present to a notorious Wall Street bank.
Under the richly compensated leadership of Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, has admitted to an unprecedented five criminal felony counts since 2014 and put on criminal probation three times. Dimon notched two of those felony counts in his belt today. (That’s five felonies more than the bank pleaded guilty to in its prior 100 years of existence. Translation: this is not normal even on Wall Street.)
The bank has agreed today to pay criminal fines and admit to two felony counts of wire fraud for manipulating (spoofing) trading in the precious metals and U.S. Treasury markets. Why the Justice Department is bringing only two counts when its own charging document indicates that traders engaged in “tens of thousands of instances of unlawful trading in gold, silver, platinum, and palladium…as well as thousands of instances of unlawful trading in U.S. Treasury futures contracts and in U.S. Treasury notes and bonds…” is one more sign that this Justice Department is egregiously failing the American people and making a mockery of the word “justice.”
This Justice Department is not only defining deviancy down; it’s defining outrage down. Where is the U.S. Attorney’s voice announcing his resignation over this sellout of a deal?
The routine of charging the largest bank in the United States with felonies and placing it on a three-year probation is now so yawn-worthy at the U.S. Department of Justice that the prosecutors didn’t even bother to hold the usual press conference today to announce the charges and settlement. The Justice Department simply issued a press release and a Deferred Prosecution Agreement which both sides had already signed…
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