BRANKO MARCETIC, [email protected], @BMarchetich
Marcetic is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and was featured on the IPA news release “Epstein, Blackmail, Israel: Trump ‘Annihilates’ His Credibility.”
He just wrote the piece “A Judge’s Conflict of Interest Over Jeffrey Epstein Documents,” which states: “A judge who sealed a slew of Jeffrey Epstein–related documents that could implicate others is the same Chevron-connected judge who threw the book at [environmental and human rights lawyer] Steven Donziger. She has another potential conflict of interest when it comes to the Epstein files.”
Judge Loretta Preska “through her husband’s law firm” has “connections to a number of other financial institutions tied to Epstein, throwing an even darker shadow on her prior sealing of these documents.” Preska’s spouse is Thomas Kavaler, “a fifty-year veteran of Cahill Gordon & Reindel.”
The firm “defended Deutsche Bank after it was sued by a group of its investors over the fact that it had done business with Epstein long after he had been convicted and his crimes had become widely known.”
Also, it “has represented JPMorgan Chase more than a dozen times over the past twenty years, another bank hit with a class-action lawsuit over its business relationship with Epstein, one that persisted for many years after he registered as a sex offender. …
“Cahill Gordon has also represented Bear Stearns, the now-defunct investment bank bought by JPMorgan after the 2008 financial crisis put it on the verge of bankruptcy. Bear Stearns was where Epstein got his start in the world of finance, becoming a limited partner over his five years there before leaving in 1981. It was also reportedly rife with sexual harassment by those at the very top.”
In addition, “Preska has another, much more direct relationship to Bear Stearns than through her husband’s law firm: in 2014, she and Kavaler purchased a Manhattan penthouse for $8.7 million from its disgraced former chairman Richard Harriton, who sold it to them for $500,000 less than its original asking price. Harriton, who joined the firm in 1979 and came to head Bear Stearns’s clearing unit, was later fined $1 million and banned from the securities industry over allegations of fraud.”
So, notes Marcetic, “the judge who sealed these Epstein documents also bought a discounted multimillion-dollar penthouse from an executive of the firm with which Epstein was arguably most closely associated.”