Ron Wyden

Ronald Lee Wyden (born May 3, 1949, in Wichita, Kansas) is a Democratic senator from Oregon, elected in a special election on January 30, 1996 after serving in the United States House of Representatives from 1981. He sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Budget and Energy and Natural Resources committees, and the Joint Committee on Taxation, and is ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, which he chaired when his staff opened an inquiry in June 2022 into Leon Black's payments to Jeffrey Epstein. The inquiry grew into an investigation of the suspicious-activity reporting of JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America, published as a report on August 4, 2026.¹²³

Early Career

Wyden attended the University of California, Santa Barbara on a basketball scholarship, played two seasons of Division I basketball, and transferred to Stanford University, where he completed his bachelor's degree. He received his law degree from the University of Oregon School of Law in 1974, taught gerontology, co-founded the Oregon chapter of the Gray Panthers, and directed Oregon Legal Services for the Elderly from 1977 to 1979.¹

Intelligence Oversight

At a March 12, 2013 open hearing of the Intelligence Committee, Wyden asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper whether the National Security Agency collected "any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans." Clapper answered, "No, sir." After Edward Snowden's disclosures, Clapper wrote to committee chair Dianne Feinstein on June 21, 2013 that he had been thinking of content rather than metadata collection under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and that "my response was clearly erroneous, for which I apologize." A Wyden spokesman said Clapper's office had acknowledged the statement was inaccurate shortly after the hearing but "refused to correct the public record when given the opportunity."⁴ Wyden's Senate biography credits him with forcing the declassification of the CIA Inspector General's report on the September 11 attacks, shutting down the Total Information Awareness program, and drawing attention to the reliance of the Bush and Obama administrations on "secret law."¹

The Leon Black Inquiry

The Finance Committee's inquiry began in June 2022, prompted, in the committee's words, by "inconsistencies" in the report that the law firm Dechert prepared for Apollo Global Management's board on Black's payments of 158 million dollars to Epstein. On July 25, 2023 Wyden, as chairman, announced that the investigation had found a transaction Epstein devised to help Black avoid more than one billion dollars in federal gift and estate taxes, and that Black "improperly received excess income from Apollo partnership interests held in a trust, assets he indicated to the IRS he no longer owned." Black's representatives told the committee that the Internal Revenue Service had not audited any of the transactions or trusts.³

On March 11, 2025, by then ranking member, Wyden wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and FBI Director Kash Patel that Black's bank had not filed a suspicious activity report on about 156 million dollars in wires to Epstein until February 2020, six months after Epstein's death, and had flagged two more wires in a second report in October 2020. He wrote that committee staff had found 12 million dollars in wires that the Apollo board's review had not identified, and that "I have not received any explanation from Black's attorneys as to why the Apollo Board's investigation omitted or failed to identify these $12 million payments or their purpose."⁵ On June 4, 2026 he referred his findings to the House Oversight Committee ahead of Black's deposition there, writing that unsealed Justice Department files indicated Epstein "kept close tabs of women who Black had reached settlements/NDAs with and reached out to Russian government officials to help Black with these so-called problems" and "appears to have acted as a middleman for Black to pay women on Black's behalf." Black's counsel Aaron Cutler of Hogan Lovells had written to Wyden on April 13, 2026 that the inquiry concerned a "private citizen's personal life" and sought to "unfairly harass" Black.⁶

The Treasury Records and the Banks

On February 14, 2024 bipartisan Finance Committee staff reviewed Epstein-related suspicious activity reports in camera at a Treasury Department reading room. On April 4, 2024 Wyden asked Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan sixteen questions about its handling of Black's payments; the bank's counsel replied on May 6, 2024 that it would not cooperate absent a subpoena. Wyden asked Bessent for the Treasury's Epstein file on March 11, June 16 and September 2, 2025. Treasury declined each time and on January 22, 2026 told him it had provided the records to the Republican-led House Oversight Committee instead.²⁵

On September 9, 2025 Wyden introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act (S. 2746), requiring Treasury to give Congress the Epstein suspicious activity reports, a list of filing institutions, and a report on any Bank Secrecy Act investigations of those institutions. On March 3, 2026 he asked unanimous consent to pass it, telling the Senate that his staff had seen records of "4,725 wire transfers adding up to more than $1 billion in and out of his JPMorgan bank accounts in the decade after 2003" and that "there could be more than $1.5 billion in suspicious Epstein transactions." Finance Committee chairman Mike Crapo objected, stating that the House Oversight and Judiciary committees were leading the review and that the Banking Committee, not Finance, had jurisdiction over suspicious activity reports.⁷ Wyden's report stated that his office had approached Senator Marsha Blackburn's staff from June 2024 about a bipartisan subpoena for Epstein bank records and later about cosponsoring the bill, and received no commitment; Blackburn had said publicly in February 2025 that her "efforts to crack the Epstein trafficking ring wide open have been stonewalled by Democrats at every turn."²

Wyden's September 24, 2025 letter to Jamie Dimon set out 31 questions about the bank's Epstein accounts and its six-year delay in filing reports after exiting him in 2013; JPMorgan's October 10, 2025 reply answered none of them and attributed all misconduct to Jes Staley.⁸⁹ On January 15, 2026 he wrote to BNY Mellon about Epstein transactions processed through its Pershing subsidiary; its counsel also declined to cooperate.² In February 2026, after reports that Epstein and associates had been targets of a federal drug-trafficking, prostitution and money-laundering investigation, he asked the Drug Enforcement Administration for its results, and he later announced that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Donald Trump's former personal lawyer, had intervened to block the DEA from complying.¹⁰

Looking the Other Way

The August 4, 2026 report, "Looking the Other Way," concluded that JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America likely violated federal anti-money-laundering law by failing to report Epstein's transactions in time, identified Bank of America as the bank that held Black's accounts and filed the February 7, 2020 report, and named thirteen bankers, among them Mary Erdoes, Stephen Cutler, Staley and Paul Morris, whose conduct it said merited investigation. It called for criminal investigations of Epstein's lawyer Darren Indyke and accountants Richard Kahn and Harry Beller, stating that federal prosecutors had never questioned them; none of the three has been charged with a crime. It also stated that Wyden had given a taped interview on March 26, 2026 to 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi for a segment on the banks and the U.S. Virgin Islands government, that CBS News leadership under Bari Weiss fired Alfonsi shortly afterward, and that the interview had not aired.²