JP Morgan Chase Donald Trump: JPMorgan Chase closed Donald Trump’s 50 accounts, U.S. largest bank cites major reason
According to letters filed with the court, the accounts include Trump’s hotels, housing projects and retail stores in Illinois, Florida and New York, as well as personal private banking relationships that manage Trump’s inheritance from his father.
JPMorgan did not give a specific reason for the mass account closings in these letters. In an unsigned note sent to Trump dated February 19, 2021, the bank wrote that Trump should “find a more appropriate institution to do business with.”
The letter ended with “Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter,” a phrase Trump also likes to use.
In the Trump case, in which JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon is listed as a defendant, it is claimed that the bank blacklisted Trump on the grounds that “he should distance himself from President Trump and his conservative political views.” This echoed Trump’s earlier complaints that Capital One had similarly closed its accounts and Bank of America had refused to accept billions of dollars in deposits after the Jan. 6 riot.
The issue of whether and why the nation’s largest banks are taking action against Trump has become a hot-button issue for the public as the president has frequently invoked his personal experience of a broad push to “shut down the banks.” Bank executives took advantage of his enthusiasm for the issue to successfully press for looser enforcement by federal agencies of rules and regulations that instruct lenders to screen their customers for reputational risk, among other issues.
JPMorgan has so far done its best to avoid revealing whether it actually closed Trump’s accounts. In the statement made last month, it was stated that the case was baseless, but the details of Trump’s allegations were not mentioned. A bank spokesman said at the time that, as a rule, JPMorgan closes accounts “because they pose a legal or regulatory risk to the company.” A JPMorgan spokesman did not respond to a request for comment Saturday. A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said: “President Trump stands with everyone who was wrongfully debited by JPMorgan Chase and its cronies and will bring this case to a fair and appropriate conclusion.” he said.
There’s still a lot of legal wrangling. Last week, JPMorgan requested that the case be moved from Florida state court, where Trump has had some success in the case, to a federal court in New York.
