The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare
As it turned out, of course, Chase was selling those rotten dog-meat loans all over the place. How bad were they? A single lawsuit by a single angry litigant gives some insight. In 2011, Chase was sued over massive losses suffered by a group of credit unions. One of them had invested $135 million in one of the bank’s mortgage–backed securities. About 40 percent of the loans in that deal came from the GreenPoint pool.
The lawsuit alleged that in just the first year, the security suffered $51 million in losses, nearly 50 times what had been projected. It’s hard to say how much of that was due to the GreenPoint loans. But this was just one security, one year, and the losses were in the tens of millions. And Chase did deal after deal with the same methodology. So did most of the other banks. It’s theft on a scale that blows the mind.
In the spring of 2012, Fleischmann, who’d moved back to Canada after leaving Chase, was working at a law firm in Calgary when the phone rang. It was an investigator from the States. “Hi, I’m from the SEC,” he said. “You weren’t expecting to hear from me, were you?”
A few months earlier, President Obama, giving in to pressure from the Occupy movement and other reformers, had formed the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group. At least superficially, this was a serious show of force against banks like Chase. The group would operate like a kind of regulatory Justice League, combining the superpowers of investigators from the SEC, the FBI, the IRS, HUD and a host of other federal agencies. It included noted anti-corruption- investigator and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, which gave many observers reason to hope that finally something would be done about the crimes that led to the crash. That makes the fact that the bank would skate with negligible cash fines an even more extra-ordinary accomplishment.

By the time the working group was set up, most of the applicable statutes of limitations had either expired or were about to expire. “A conspiratorial way of looking at it would be to say the state waited far too long to look at these cases and is now taking its sweet time investigating, while the last statutes of limitations run out,” says famed prosecutor and former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
It soon became clear that the SEC wasn’t so much investigating Chase’s behavior as just checking boxes. Fleischmann received no follow-up phone calls, even though she told the investigator that she was willing to tell the SEC everything she knew about the systemic fraud at Chase. Instead, the SEC focused on a single transaction involving a mortgage company called WMC. “I kept trying to talk to them about GreenPoint,” Fleischmann says, “but they just wanted to talk about that other deal.”
The following year, the SEC would fine Chase $297 million for misrepresentations in the WMC deal. On the surface, it looked like a hefty punishment. In reality, it was a classic example of the piecemeal, cherry-picking style of justice that characterized the post-crisis era. “The kid-gloves approach that the DOJ and the SEC take with Wall Street is as inexplicable as it is indefensible,” says Dennis Kelleher of the financial reform group Better Markets, which would later file suit challenging the Chase settlement. “They typically charge only one offense when there are dozens. It would be like charging a serial murderer with a single assault and giving them probation.”
Soon Fleischmann’s hopes were raised again. In late 2012 and early 2013, she had a pair of interviews with civil litigators from the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of California, based in Sacramento.
One of the ongoing myths about the financial crisis is that the government is outmatched by the legal talent representing the banks. But Fleischmann was impressed by the lead attorney in her case, a litigator named Richard Elias. “He sounded like he had been a securities lawyer for 10 years,” she says. “This actually looked like his idea of fun – like he couldn’t wait to run with this case.”
She gave Elias and his team detailed information about everything she’d seen: the edict against e-mails, the sabotaging of the diligence process, the bullying, the written warnings that were ignored, all of it. She assumed that it wouldn’t be long before the bank was hauled into court.
Instead, the government decided to help Chase bury the evidence. It began when Holder’s office scheduled a press conference for the morning of September 24th, 2013, to announce sweeping civil-fraud charges against the bank, all laid out in a detailed complaint drafted by the U.S. attorney’s Sacramento office. But that morning the presser was suddenly canceled, and no complaint was filed. According to later news reports, Dimon had personally called Associate Attorney General Tony West, the third-ranking official in the Justice Department, and asked to reopen negotiations to settle the case out of court.
It goes without saying that the ordinary citizen who is the target of a government investigation cannot simply pick up the phone, call up the prosecutor in charge of his case and have a legal proceeding canceled. But Dimon did just that. “And he didn’t just call the prosecutor, he called the prosecutor’s boss,” Fleischmann says. According to The New York Times, after Dimon had already offered $3 billion to settle the case and was turned down, he went to Holder’s office and upped the offer, but apparently not by enough.
A few days later, Fleischmann, who had by then moved back to Vancouver and was looking for work, was at a mall when she saw a Wall Street Journal headline on her iPhone: JPMorgan Insider Helps U.S. in Probe. The story said that the government had a key witness, a female employee willing to provide damaging testimony about Chase’s mortgage operations. Fleischmann was stunned. Until that moment, she had no idea that she was a major part of the government’s case against Chase. And worse, nobody had bothered to warn her that she was about to be effectively outed in the newspapers. “The stress started to build after I saw that news,” she says. “Especially as I waited to see if my name would come out and I watched my job possibilities evaporate.”
Fleischmann later realized that the government wasn’t interested in having her testify against Chase in court or any other public forum. Instead, the Justice Department’s political wing, led by Holder, appeared to be using her, and her evidence, as a bargaining chip to extract more hush money from Dimon. It worked. Within weeks, Dimon had upped his offer to roughly $9 billion.