As the Wall Street Journal reported this morning that President Trump is prepared to issue an executive order that “directs bank regulators to investigate whether any financial institutions might have violated the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, antitrust laws or consumer financial-protection laws,” the President told CNBC that he was debanked by Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co:
Trump told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in a wide-ranging interview that JPMorgan Chase informed him he had 20 days to move “hundreds of millions of dollars in cash” to another bank. He didn’t say when this happened.
The president said he then approached Bank of America to “deposit a billion dollars-plus” and was told the bank couldn’t provide him an account, Trump said.
″[Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan] said, ‘We can’t do it,’” Trump said. “So I went to another one, another one, another one. I ended up going to small banks all over the place. I mean, I was putting $10 million here, $10 million there.”…
“The banks discriminated against me very badly, and I was very good to the banks,” Trump said.
Trump said that he believes that banks rejected him and his supporters because regulators during the Biden administration applied pressure to the companies.
NLPC has tried to address the debanking discrimination problem against Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase head-on through the shareholder proposal process.
We submitted a shareholder proposal at Chase in 2023 that asked the company to produce a report on requests it had received from the federal government to close customer accounts. The Securities and Exchange Commission under former President Biden ruled that the company could exclude NLPC’s proposal from the annual meeting because it did not address a significant-enough issue to be considered. The proposal was inspired by numerous examples of conservatives — including former Kansas Governor and Senator Sam Brownback — being debanked by Chase and other major banks. The same year another shareholder sponsored a proposal that addressed religious discrimination at Chase, which NLPC supported with a proxy memorandum filed at the SEC.
Making the bank’s policies and practices more odious was the fact that Chase allowed Jeffrey Epstein to maintain accounts for years. Chase paid $75 million in late 2023 to settle a lawsuit over the bank’s alleged aid to the late sex trafficker.
For Bank of America, NLPC submitted a proposal intended for the 2025 annual meeting, which sought disclosure about the company’s policies and practices with regard to providing customers’ private information to government agencies. Last year the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released reports that heavily criticized several large U.S. banks, and singled out Bank of America for its particularly egregious betrayal of its customers’ trust. The reports focused on how the financial institutions turned over customers’ financial and transaction data to federal authorities — most specifically following the incident U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 — without legal justification.
However, once again, the SEC allowed a major financial institution to evade accountability by allowing Bank of America to exclude NLPC’s proposal from its annual meeting earlier this year. Perhaps it was too soon before the he was able to fully clean house at the SEC, but the decision came down under President Trump’s administration (obviously). At the same time the SEC allowed a woke shareholder proposal seeking information about the bank’s financing of “low-carbon” energy supplies vs. fossil fuels. This came after President Trump bashed both companies’ Chairman/CEOs Brian Moynihan (Bank of America) and Jamie Dimon (Chase) over their debanking practices, in a speech at the World Economic Forum in January.
While NLPC’s proposal was rejected for Bank of America’s annual meeting, we still weighed in against the re-election of Moynihan to the company’s board of directors with a proxy memorandum circulated to shareholders, which is also filed with the SEC. A New York Post report in late March echoed our contention that Moynihan’s woke leadership has met with disapproval, even internally at the bank.
Now President Trump appears ready to call for investigations and accountability for the big banks’ discrimination practices via executive order. He could have set those wheels in motion much earlier, but better late than never (we guess).
(Pictured above: Brian Moynihan and President Trump at the White House)
