President Donald Trump sued JPMorgan Chase and CEO Jamie Dimon on Thursday, alleging the bank closed his and related entities’ accounts for political reasons following the Jan. 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol, CNBC reported.
Trump and the other plaintiffs in the case, which comprise a group of business entities linked to the U.S. president, are seeking at least $5 billion in civil damages, according to the news outlet. JPMorgan has denied closing the accounts for political reasons, suggesting instead that the decisions were made in compliance with federal regulations.
The lawsuit alleges that the lender failed to disclose why the accounts were “debanked” and asserts that the plaintiffs later learned that the decisions were discriminatory against Trump, the Trump Organization, the Trump family, and affiliated entities, according to CNBC, which also noted that the complaint does not specify what information the litigants subsequently learned.
“Plaintiffs are confident that JPMC’s unilateral decision came about as a result of political and social motivations, and JPMC’s unsubstantiated, ‘woke’ beliefs that it needed to distance itself from President Trump and his conservative political views,” the lawsuit alleges, according to the report. “In essence, JPMC debanked Plaintiffs’ Accounts because it believed that the political tide at the moment favored doing so.”
The lawsuit also alleges that JPMorgan, “at the direction of Dimon,” unlawfully published some or all of the plaintiffs’ names on a “blacklist” accessible by federally regulated banks, the news outlet said. The complaint describes the purported blacklist as a compilation of individuals and entities with a history of malfeasance or noncompliance with banking rules.
The complaint, filed in state court in Miami Dade County, does not provide a name for the alleged blacklist nor does it indicate that such a list was formally adopted by U.S. financial regulators, CNBC said.
Last month, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) concluded in a preliminary review of “debanking practices” that nine of the largest U.S. lenders made “inappropriate distinctions” among customers in politically sensitive sectors, including by applying enhanced risk controls in response to negative media reports.
Between 2020 and 2023, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp, Capital One, PNC Financial Services, Toronto-Dominion Bank and Bank of Montreal restricted access to services or subjected certain clients to extra layers of review and approval, the agency said in the review.
Some of the banks, or lines of business within the banks, went further than regulations require by adopting policies that “may have triggered a heightened review of customers or potential customers based on negative discussion of them in newspaper articles or other media sources,” the agency concluded.
The lawsuit filed Thursday comes amid resistance within the banking sector to President Trump’s plan to place a 10% cap on credit card rates. Dimon, a vocal critic of the proposal, said the cap would lead to an “economic disaster,” according to Reuters.
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