Lehman and its its creditors have subpoenaed Timothy Geithner over his discussions with JPMorgan Chase over the time when the investment bank collapsed:

Lehman Brothers‘ bankruptcy estate and its official committee of unsecured creditors asked a court late on Thursday to compel Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to testify about the investment bank’s collapse.

The request for a subpoena comes as part of the estate’s lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, which asserts that the bank illegally took $8.6 billion in collateral from Lehman, precipitating that firm’s demise.

The lawsuit’s main argument is that JPMorgan, apprised of Lehman’s fragile condition, improperly profited from making its collateral demands — and also pushed Lehman into bankruptcy.

Lawyers for Lehman’s creditors wrote in a court filing that they and the estate served Mr. Geithner with a subpoena last August, ordering him to testify about conversations he had held with both JPMorgan and Lehman over the former’s calls for collateral in early September 2008.

Mr. Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, spoke with JPMorgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, 10 times in the week before Lehman fell, according to the filing. Many of those conversations, the lawyers contend, must have been about JPMorgan’s collateral demands.

Basically, Lehman is asserting that Jamie Dimon’s bully boys stole from them in order to push them over into bankruptcy.

The implication is that they did so because they knew that, in the event of a collapse, they would get to keep the money.

Note that they are not asking about deliberations at the NY Fed, but the content of his discussions with Jamie Dimon.

Still, I relish the though of Geithner in the dock forced to answer questions about his dealings with the big banks.