The Justice Department is looking at money that moved through Wall Street. The trail leads to Tehran.
Federal investigators are reviewing a global business network tied to Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. They want to know how that money moved through major U.S. banks.
JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup were both named in a Bloomberg report this week. The DOJ is reportedly looking at whether their pipes processed transactions linked to the network.
None of the three - JPMorgan, Citigroup, or the DOJ - immediately responded to requests for comment.
The probe is part of a wider case into alleged money laundering and graft inside Khamenei's network. Bloomberg's reporting says the main target is the network itself, not the banks.
But anyone who handled the money is now in the file. That is the standing problem for global banks.
Sanctioned funds rarely arrive with a label on them. They move through layers of shell companies, foreign holding funds, and ownership setups that take time and tools to unwind.
A network like Khamenei's is exactly the kind of structure built to be hard to read.
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Mojtaba Khamenei stepped into the supreme leader role after his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in a joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike. The Trump administration has since stepped up pressure on Tehran over sanctions evasion and hidden finance.
The DOJ probe lands in the middle of that push. It also lands as Washington and Tehran continue talks on the bigger ceasefire deal that has been moving in fits and starts since the spring.
Both banks traded lower on the day the report broke, with JPM falling 2.47% and Citigroup slipping 0.50%.
This is the kind of probe Wall Street has tried to get ahead of for years. Anti-money-laundering teams at the biggest U.S. banks spend billions building systems to flag exactly this kind of transaction.
But bank-deal news and shifting sanctions lists keep changing what those systems have to catch. A network with global holdings built through layered ownership is the hardest case to crack.
An investigation does not equal charges. Bloomberg said as much in its own reporting.
But it does mean compliance teams at the two biggest U.S. banks will be answering questions about how their systems handled a network they may never have known they were touching.
That is the kind of question Wall Street prefers not to be the answer to.
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