(Bloomberg) -- When FBI agents knocked on the door of his Brooklyn, New York, home in August 2018, trader John Edmonds told them he didn’t know anything about gold and silver price manipulation at JPMorgan Chase & Co. That was a lie, he admitted Thursday.

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Edmonds, who worked at JPMorgan for about a decade, eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy and commodities fraud and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. He’s now a key government witness against his former boss, Michael Nowak, the longtime head of the precious-metals trading desk; gold trader Gregg Smith; and hedge fund salesman Jeffrey Ruffo.

During two days of testimony at a criminal trial in Chicago, Edmonds described how the three senior executives routinely used “spoof” trades -- huge orders that are quickly canceled before they can be executed -- to push precious metals up or down from 2008 to 2016 to make trades for the bank and its clients more profitable. Edmonds said he learned how to spoof at JPMorgan.

But Nowak’s defense lawyer David Meister, over several hours of cross examination Thursday, sought to undermine the credibility of Edmonds, who testified earlier that he’d committed no crimes since leaving JPMorgan in 2017.

Meister questioned Edmonds about his FBI interview in 2018, and played a recording of the encounter made by the agents.

“I don’t know what was going on in the market at that time,” Edmonds can be heard saying on the recording played for the jury. “Not spoofing,...

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