Debanking

President Donald Trump sued Wall Street giant JP Morgan for $5 billion on Thursday, claiming in a Florida lawsuit that the company debanked him and his businesses for political reasons.

The legal action, against both the bank and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, follows threats the president made on Saturday to sue JP Morgan for “incorrectly and inappropriately debanking me after the January 6th protest, a protest that turned out to be correct for those doing the protesting.”

In the lawsuit, Trump’s attorneys claim JP Morgan Chase decided to close the president’s accounts in early 2021 “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.”

A JP Morgan spokesperson did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.

The Trump family has long claimed that it was shut out of America’s top banks following the events of January 6, 2021, and the end of Trump’s first presidential term. They have also said those events were a key motivator behind the family’s eventual embrace of crypto as an alternative financial system with fewer gatekeepers.

President Trump’s first extensive comments on the subject of debanking came last June, in response to a question from Decrypt. 

“I can tell you, because I’ve been a victim myself, because of my politics, that big banks were very nasty to us,” Trump said at the time, speaking from the Oval Office. He went on to lay blame for the issue on the Joe Biden administration—not bank executives. 

“If the Biden people order the banks to be virtually closed, they can do anything they want. The regulators control the banks,” Trump said. “It’s not the president of the bank. The president of the bank is far less important to a bank than a regulator, and a regulator can put that bank out of business.”

Trump’s new lawsuit, however, puts blame squarely on the shoulders of JP Morgan’s leadership for declining to do business with the Trump family.

A few weeks after Trump made those initial statements about debanking, he signed an executive order in August directing federal banking regulators to adopt policies to prevent debanking related to political views—and also, related to crypto.

“The digital assets industry has […] been the unfair target of debanking initiatives,” the order said.

Crypto leaders have long claimed they lost access to traditional banking under the Biden administration, and alleged the federal government orchestrated a secretive plot, dubbed “Operation Chokepoint 2.0,” to keep the industry cut off from basic financial services.

Debanking has long been a core issue uniting crypto advocates and the president’s family.

Federal banking regulators, under the current Trump administration, have since adopted explicit policies to assuage crypto leaders’ debanking-related concerns.