Jay Clayton, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the District of Southern New York, has been tasked with investigating “people and institutions” tied to Jeffrey Esptein—but he himself has financial ties to the very Wall Street banks and firms under scrutiny, The Lever reported Thursday. Clayton holds between $1.5 million and $6 million worth of Apollo Global Management stock, according to public financial disclosures. He previously served as the group’s board chairman from 2021 until his Justice Department appointment in 2025. Leon Black, the billionaire former CEO of Apollo Global Management, was ousted from his role in 2021 after an internal review discovered he’d made $150 million in payments to Epstein for financial advice between 2012 and 2017. Black was later accused of raping a 16-year-old at Epstein’s mansion. He was ordered Thursday to be deposed as part of a lawsuit alleging Bank of America profited from Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking. Clayton also holds between between $15,000 and $50,000 in JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America stock, as well as between $1,000 and $15,000 in Bank of New York Mellon and Citigroup stock—where Congress alleges $1.5 billion in “suspicious financial transactions tied to sex trafficking crimes committed by Jeffrey Epstein” and his co-conspirators once flowed. Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden previously published a report finding that executives at JPMorgan Chase waited to disclose Epstein’s suspicious transactions to regulators in order “to continue working with Epstein,” even after he was terminated as a client over money laundering concerns. Citing newly unsealed emails, the report indicated this was done because of Epstein’s influence over Black. Wyden also pressed the Treasury Department to probe Citibank for “suspicious activities” related to Epstein. Clayton was also tasked with spearheading the work of redacting victims’ identifying information from the trove of documents published by the Department of Justice—an entirely separate debacle that has seen images of public officials redacted while publishing 40 nude pictures of women (possibly underage), among a plethora of other errors. “Jay Clayton has a very personal interest in seeing the Epstein story as a cabined-off story involving a mysterious ‘who could have ever known it’ villain, rather than the story of interconnected immoral elites it appears to be to impartial people,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a government watchdog.“That’s a really paralyzing bias to bring to the role of prosecutor,” Hauser said. “We should want professional skeptics to serve our prosecutors, not the credulous.”