On October 16, 2008, JPMorgan Chase’s communications team sat down to dinner with its Washington Mutual counterparts in a private room at Purple, a swanky downtown Seattle wine bar.

Just three weeks earlier, JPMorgan’s leader, the charismatic CEO Jamie Dimon, had purchased WaMu from the federal government after regulators seized the bank, saying it was about to fail.

Now, with an understanding audience, WaMu’s team complained about negative news reports that had undermined confidence in their bank, prompting a big deposit run in its final weeks.

We couldn’t “get ahead of the story,” said one of them, according to former WaMu employees who attended the meeting.

The JPMorgan team sympathized, then made a jarring remark.

We were watching money “fly out of the bank,” from a “war room” at JPMorgan’s New York headquarters, said one JPMorgan executive, according to these people.

WaMu staffers who heard the comment were startled. They believed that kind of detailed information was strictly confidential, known only to a select handful at WaMu—and the bank’s federal regulators.

“There were several of us that looked at each other and thought, Did he just say that?” said one former employee who attended.

A JPMorgan official who was at the meeting denied this week that the remark was made and that the bank had such information. Dimon and other officials declined repeated requests to comment further for this story.

If JPMorgan had this kind of inside knowledge of WaMu’s deposit run, that means the corporate privacy of the nation’s largest savings and loan could have been compromised—with immense implications for WaMu executives, the bank, and its thousands of shareholders. At the time, just weeks before WaMu’s September 25 seizure, the executives were trying quietly to sell the bank, and were at the same time battling, with the help of the communications team, to control WaMu’s image and quash rumors about financial problems during the intense financial turbulence of 2008.

It is possible that JPMorgan received the information through a normal due diligence process: The bank had signaled its interest in WaMu’s auction and had access to its “data room” of financial reports. But a WaMu executive familiar with WaMu’s bidders at the time said that detailed deposit outflow information was not handed out to prospective buyers.

A Long-Term Plan

Now, more than a year after WaMu’s closure, recently released court documents and an ongoing investigation by the Puget Sound Business Journal suggest that JPMorgan was working months in advance on a plan to acquire WaMu once the government seized the bank from its shareholders.

The documents also appear to show that regulators were working with JPMorgan to structure the deal well before the bank was seized.

The Business Journal reviewed more than 1,000 pages of internal JPMorgan emails and financial presentations produced as exhibits in court filings, as well as public records released through the Freedom of Information Act, and interviewed dozens of people familiar with WaMu’s closure, including government officials, former regulators, and outside experts.

The new information shows that JPMorgan had a detailed plan to acquire WaMu from regulators as early as July 2008, more than two months before the tumultuous days in late September when the government formally signaled that it planned to seize WaMu and offer it to bidders.

By September 11, JPMorgan appeared to expect that WaMu would be taken over by the government and was making detailed preparations to buy it as a distressed asset, according to the documents.

JPMorgan’s influence over the process remains unclear. But the bank’s preparations suggest that regulators had signaled they planned to close the bank even as Sheila Bair, the chairman of the FDIC, was telling WaMu’s chief executive that she was helping them find a private buyer.

Regulators cited a run on WaMu deposits as their reason for seizing it on September 25. But the court documents show JPMorgan’s preparations were under way before the bank run started on September 11.