How America’s Largest Bank Helped Jeffrey Epstein, and a Show of Resistance in D.C.

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From the New York Times, it's the headlines.

I'm Tracy Mumford.

Today's Monday, September 8th.

Here's what we're covering.

A new investigation from The Times just out this morning looks at the close relationship between America's leading bank, JPMorgan, and the convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.

Some elements of this have become public over the years.

The bank agreed to pay almost $300 million to Epstein's victims back in 2023 for ignoring warnings about him.

But Times reporters combed through more than 13,000 pages of legal and financial records to understand the full extent of the bank's involvement.

What they found is that JP Morgan spent years supporting and profiting from Epstein while repeatedly ignoring red flags and the concerns of some of their own employees.

A few of their takeaways.

The bank was crucial for Epstein as he carried out his sex trafficking operation.

In all, JP Morgan processed more than 4,700 transactions, totaling more than $1.1 billion for him, including payments to his victims.

JP JPMorgan also allowed Epstein to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars in cash a month, amounts that should have set off internal alarms.

Beyond those transactions, the Times found that the bank opened accounts for Epstein's victims and assistants, sometimes without conducting proper due diligence.

For example, at Epstein's request, the bank agreed to open accounts for two young women without actually speaking to either of them.

At the same time, Epstein was making money and connections for the bank.

He helped them orchestrate a key hedge fund acquisition and introduced bank executives to men who would become lucrative clients, including the co-founder of Google, Sergei Brin.

At one point in 2011, Epstein was called in for a meeting at the bank's headquarters in Manhattan.

The executives were weighing all of this, both his illicit behavior, he'd pleaded guilty a few years earlier to soliciting sex with a minor, and his benefit to the bank.

In that meeting, Epstein promised the bank's general counsel that he'd, quote, turned over a new leaf.

He rattled off the names of prominent figures who he said could vouch for his character.

Go talk to Bill Gates about me, he said.

The general counsel ultimately recommended that JPMorgan should cut ties with Epstein, but he did not insist on it, and he did not escalate the issue.

So, Epstein was allowed to stay.

It wasn't until two years later that the bank decided to kick Epstein out under increasing pressure from federal regulators for failing to report suspicious activities to the government.

For the full investigation, including how one of JPMorgan's highest-ranking executives made trips to Epstein's private island and his ranch in New Mexico, go to nytimes.com.

In Ukraine yesterday, Russia unleashed its largest drone assault to date, launching more than 800 exploding drones and decoys across the country.

At least five people were killed, and in Kyiv, flames leaped from the windows of a government building near parliament and the president's office.

It was the first time a building in the city's heavily guarded government district has been damaged since the war began.

Firefighters fought the flames from a helicopter.

The drone barrage marked the latest attack in a relentless offensive that's continued and even ramped up recently despite the Trump administration's efforts to mediate peace talks.

Speaking to reporters on Sunday, President Trump said he was prepared to increase sanctions on Russia for failing to reach a ceasefire deal.

Though Trump's previous threats to punish Russia have been largely empty, with deadlines he said coming and going without consequence.

Yesterday, the South Korean government announced that it's sending a chartered plane to the U.S.

to pick up hundreds of South Korean workers who were caught up in an immigration raid last week.

The workers were detained Thursday at an electric vehicle battery plant that's under construction near Savannah, Georgia.

The plant is owned by two South Korean companies, LG Energy Solution and Hyundai.

The U.S.

government called it the largest ever raid on a single work site, saying 475 people were arrested, most of them South Korean citizens who were allegedly living and working in the U.S.

illegally.

The raid has underscored competing tensions inside the Trump administration.

Officials want to crack down on immigration, even as they want to boost domestic manufacturing, especially of crucial technologies like batteries.

Industry experts say that because the U.S.

is new to battery production, for example, companies have decided to bring in experienced engineers and technicians from overseas.

For the moment, the raid could scare off those kinds of skilled workers from coming to the U.S., which could slow construction on new high-tech projects and drive up costs.

In Washington, D.C., it's now been nearly a month since President Trump launched his show of force in the city, taking control of the police department and deploying the National Guard.

It's led to a flurry of arrests and charges from prosecutors.

But as the cases have been brought to grand juries, the grand juries have been rejecting many of them and what appears to be a show of resistance by DC residents who are refusing to indict their neighbors.

While grand jury proceedings are secret, making it impossible to know exactly what they're thinking, it's extremely rare for jurors to reject cases from the outset like they've been doing.

One former U.S.

attorney told the Times she'd only seen that happen once or twice in 20 years, and that she guessed the jurors are, quote, seeing prosecutorial overreach and they don't want to be part of it.

Because Trump has deployed so many federal agents in D.C., many of the defendants are getting charged with federal felonies for otherwise relatively minor offenses.

And many of the cases that grand juries have rejected have then been downgraded or dismissed by prosecutors, a kind of acknowledgement that they were overcharged to begin with.

The most prominent example of that, the former Justice Department employee who threw a sub-sandwich at a federal agent and was charged with felony assault.

After a grand jury refused to indict him, his charges were dropped down to a misdemeanor.

One of the leading AI companies in the world, Anthropic, has agreed to pay a landmark settlement after a judge found it had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books.

To build chatbots and other services, AI companies have had to use massive amounts of data to train their models, and it sparked a lot of questions about where they're getting that data in the first place.

In Anthropic's case, the judge ruled that using books for that kind of training was within the bounds of fair use under the law, as long as they were legally acquired.

For example, at one point the company bought physical books in bulk from publishers and scanned them so they could use them for training.

But the judge also found that the company had illegally acquired millions of pirated books from online libraries, effectively stealing them.

Now the company has agreed to pay $3,000 per work to half a million authors, a $1.5 billion settlement that's the largest in the history of U.S.

copyright cases.

It's not immediately clear what implications the settlement might have for the dozens of other lawsuits that copyright holders have brought against AI companies, though experts say it could pave the way for more of them to pay rights holders, either through licensing fees or future settlements.

And finally, Zodiac sign is Leo.

We're known to be very loyal, very powerful.

Aries, you're the first son of the Zodiac.

You're literally walking around.

We can all feel your energy.

Whether or not you have ever checked your horoscope, whether or not you believe in that kind of stuff at all, you probably still know your Zodiac sign.

Gemini is outgoing and flaky.

Cancer is loyal and moody.

And as it turns out,

you are probably wrong.

Here's why.

The 12 zodiac signs were originally calculated 2,000 plus years ago based on whichever constellation was behind the sun on your birth date.

But things have changed.

The Earth wobbles in its rotation, changing our view of the stars degree by degree in a way that builds up over the centuries.

The Times actually calculated just just how much that's changed things.

If you were born today, September 8th, happy birthday, you probably always thought you were a Virgo.

2,000 years ago, that was right.

But this year, the actual constellation behind the sun is Leo.

I'm sorry to break that to you.

For everybody else, you can follow the link to Times coverage in our show notes to find out what sign you actually are.

There are some other factors at play beyond the Earth's wobble.

For one thing, the zodiac system functions as if each of the key constellations is the same size, but they're not.

Some spend more time behind the sun than others, making Virgo's season longer than Cancer, for example.

Also, the Babylonians, who set all of this up and thus are to blame for all of this, left out a 13th constellation, Ophiuchus.

They went with the nice round number of 12, but this whole time, there have been Ophiuchins out there walking among us.

Those are the headlines.

Today on the daily, details about what life has been like on the ground in Washington, D.C.

since President Trump deployed the National Guard.

You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Tracy Mumford.

We'll be back tomorrow.

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