Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) accused the Justice Department of "secretly hiding" an FBI interview with a banker tied to Jeffrey Epstein to protect Wall Street.
Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, made the accusation in an interview with MeidasTouch on Wednesday. The same day, he sent a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel demanding every FBI 302 report tied to investigations into Epstein and his associates.
"I have learned that the Department of Justice is secretly hiding an FBI Epstein document for one reason, to protect the Wall Street banks," Wyden said. "This document describes an interview with one of the Epstein bankers, and it would help make the case that the biggest Wall Street banks need to be punished for looking the other way."
"My view is that Todd Blanche and Kash Patel are covering this up," he added. "Covering this up to protect the banks who worked with Epstein."
According to the letter, Wyden's investigators recently learned that the FBI has a 302 report memorializing the banker interview, which was conducted as part of a criminal investigation. The report was left out of the documents DOJ released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Wyden wrote that its existence "indicates that it is likely that the FBI possesses additional related 302s that have not been released."
The letter, which was featured in a Wednesday report by MeidasTouch, does not name the banker, the bank or when the interview took place. Wyden told MeidasTouch, "I'm not naming the person who was interviewed in order to protect my source."
The demand builds on a Finance Committee report Wyden released last month. It presented evidence that executives at JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America violated federal anti-money laundering laws by failing to screen and report Epstein's suspicious transactions in a timely manner, according to reporting by MeidasTouch.
According to the letter, the banks were "looking the other way" as Epstein withdrew millions of dollars in cash with no clear business purpose and took part in thousands of suspicious wire transfers worth at least $1.4 billion.
"If the Wall Street banks had just followed the law that was on the books, nothing new, just the law that was on the books, we could have ended this Epstein horror show years and years earlier," Wyden told MeidasTouch. "And the banks don't want that out."
