by Pam Martens and Russ Martens at Wall Street on Parade
On March 15, 2022, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a Memorandum to the heads of executive departments and to federal agencies mandating how they were to handle Freedom of Information Act requests. Garland wrote:
“For more than fifty years, the Freedom of lnformation Act (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. § 552, has been a vital tool for ensuring transparency, accessibility, and accountability in government. As the Supreme Court has explained, the Act’s ‘basic purpose … is to ensure an informed citizenry,’ which is ‘vital to the functioning of a democratic society [and] needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.’ NLRB v. Robbins Tire & Rubber Co., 437 U.S. 214,242 (1978).”
Despite this laudable endorsement of FOIA by the Biden administration’s top law enforcement officer, the Securities and Exchange Commission under Chair Gary Gensler is drawing a dark curtain around a case of critical public interest and importance to the American people in rooting out ingrained and systemic corruption on Wall Street.
Wall Street On Parade is a public interest financial news site which has already devoted months of research into bringing in-depth reports on this matter to the public’s attention. But despite this, the taxpayer-supported SEC is refusing to provide Wall Street On Parade with even a shred of paper in response to our FOIA request.
The case involves the more than 15 years that the taxpayer-backstopped Wall Street mega bank, JPMorgan Chase, was making 9,000 money transactions totaling $2.4 billion and providing hundreds of thousands of dollars in hard cash annually to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein – knowing full well for much of that time that Epstein was a Level 3 Registered Sex Offender and was credibly alleged by the Palm Beach County Police Department (supported with videotaped victim testimony) to have sexually assaulted dozens of underage schoolgirls, paying them $200 to $1,000 in hard cash after each encounter to stay quiet.
Making JPMorgan Chase’s position even more indefensible, internal documents obtained during discovery in federal lawsuits show that the bank held accounts not just for Epstein, but for his accomplices, procurers of underage girls, and victims. The bank casually moved money from Epstein into these accounts on a regular basis.
According to internal documents and depositions in the federal lawsuit brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands against JPMorgan Chase for “actively participating in Epstein’s sex trafficking venture,” the bank conducted a secret internal investigation into bank employees’ relationship with Epstein. It dubbed the internal investigation “Project JEEP.” (The JE was for Jeffrey and the EP was for Epstein.) That internal investigation turned up hundreds of highly incriminating emails showing the nauseatingly sycophantic relationship that bank executives maintained with Epstein. (See a partial listing of 260 of those emails here.)
As the JPMorgan Chase executives were falling over themselves…
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