House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said Thursday that former JPMorgan Chase investment banking chief Jes Staley encouraged the bank to retain Jeffrey Epstein as a client despite internal red flags about the convicted sex offender.
“It appears that within JPMorgan there were flags — red flags — about Epstein, but Mr. Staley is on record defending Epstein and encouraging JPMorgan to keep him as a client,” Comer, R-Ky., told CNBC outside Staley’s closed-door interview with the committee. “So we have a lot of questions about that.”
Staley served as Epstein’s private banker during his more than three decades at JPMorgan and maintained a close personal relationship with him for years.
“If it weren’t for banks and bankers like Jes Staley, then Jeffrey Epstein would not have been able to continue to commit these crimes against women,” Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., an oversight committee member, said at a news conference Thursday. “He would not have continued to do some of the things that he did. But it was because of these banks, that he was able to do so.”
U.K. regulators cited more than 1,000 emails between the two men, including messages in which Staley described their friendship as “profound” and referred to Epstein as “family.”
“We have email documentation that in 2010 he was requesting and interacting with Jeffrey Epstein to procure women that he had sexual encounters with, and when he was asked in [the committee hearing] what happened and to describe those encounters, he could not recall,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., another oversight committee member, said at the news conference Thursday.
Staley later became CEO of Barclays but resigned in 2021 amid a dispute with British regulators over how he characterized his relationship with Epstein. He subsequently lost an appeal of a decision banning him from the U.K. financial industry for misleading regulators about those ties.
JPMorgan agreed in 2023 to pay $290 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Epstein’s victims and $75 million to resolve a separate case brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands, without admitting liability. The bank later reached a confidential settlement with Staley.
Democrats on the oversight committee said that JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s name did not come up during their questioning.
— Karen James Sloan contributed to this report.