In 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission, under then-President Joe Biden, allowed JPMorgan Chase & Co. to exclude a shareholder proposal submitted by National Legal and Policy Center from consideration for a shareholder vote at the company’s annual meeting.
The proposal asked for the company to disclose all requests it had received from the federal government to close customers’ accounts — in other words, to reveal how and why JPMorgan was complicit with any government attempts to censor customers by “debanking” them. The SEC agreed with the company that “the Proposal relates to, and does not transcend, ordinary business matters.”
Back during the Biden administration, the SEC was much more permissive with the rules for shareholders to bring proposals. If proponents could effectively argue that their proposals addressed issues so significant (things like discrimination, climate change and a lot of the ESG agenda) that they needed to be answered for, despite otherwise perceived as addressing companies’ day-to-day decision-making, then SEC lawyers would side with proponents, effectively forcing the companies to keep their proposals on their annual meeting dockets (i.e. proxy statements).
Otherwise, if the SEC didn’t think a proponent’s issue-based proposal was such a big deal, then it wasn’t allowed at the meeting because it meddled too much in the company’s “ordinary business.”
So when we wanted to confront JPMorgan about their cooperation with the federal government in debanking conservatives, unsurprisingly, the Biden SEC allowed the company to keep us out. This, of course, followed the disturbance at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, for which Biden and his Justice Department laid the blame on President Trump for allegedly inciting a riot.
Last year, after election to his second term, President Trump shamed JPMorgan Chairman/CEO Jamie Dimon (pictured above) and Bank of America Chairman/CEO Brian Moynihan for debanking conservatives, during a speech at the World Economic Forum. Then, in August, he announced that both companies had debanked him. Then, last month, the President sued JPMorgan and Dimon for $5 billion for shutting down his various business accounts back in February 2021.
For the record, in response to earlier accusations about the debanking of Trump organization accounts, Dimon said, “People have to grow up here, OK, and stop making up things and stuff like that,” and “I can’t talk about an individual account. We do not … debank people for religious or political affiliations.” He also added, “We debank people who are Democrats. We debank people who are Republicans. We have debanked different religious folks. Never was that for that reason.”
“We don’t give information to the government just because they ask. We’re subpoenaed. We are required by court to give it to the government. And I have been following subpoenas with this administration, the last administration, the administration before that and the one before that. And I don’t agree with a lot of it.”
Now, according to the New York Times, JPMorgan has admitted it debanked the former and current President a month after the January 6 incident:
In a response to a lawsuit filed last month by Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization, JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank, said for the first time late Friday that it cut off more than 50 Trump accounts in February 2021, shortly after Mr. Trump’s first term ended.
The accounts included those for Trump hotels, housing developments and retail shops in Illinois, Florida and New York, as well as Mr. Trump’s personal private banking relationship that handled his inheritance from his father, according to letters filed to the court.
JPMorgan did not specify in those letters a specific reason for the mass account closings. In one unsigned note to Mr. Trump, dated Feb. 19, 2021, the bank wrote that he would need to “find a more suitable institution with which to conduct business.”
The letter closed with, “Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter” — a phrase that Mr. Trump himself is fond of using.
Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, which named Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, as a defendant, contended that the bank put Mr. Trump on a blacklist because it “needed to distance itself from President Trump and his conservative political views.” That echoed earlier complaints from Mr. Trump that Capital One similarly closed his accounts and that Bank of America refused to accept billions of dollars in deposits after the Jan. 6 riots.
Even granting Dimon a generous concession on his and JPMorgan’s intentions, did the bank really get subpoenas for more than 50 Trump businesses? Hotels? Real estate developments? Commercial properties? We doubt it. If so, the politicization appetites of the Biden administration and Special Counsel Jack Smith are far greater than their biggest adversaries could imagine. And if the Biden Justice Department did subpoena 50+ Trump accounts, is it responsible banking for Dimon and JPMorgan to just capitulate without questioning?
But of course, the SEC under the administration of President Trump’s successor/predecessor was more than happy to run interference for JPMorgan and Dimon when it came to NLPC’s shareholder proposal on debanking, not to mention Bank of America.
After all, shutting down more than 50 bank accounts of a President worth billions of dollars, who just departed the White House, is simply “ordinary business” that is not worthy of further scrutiny from shareholders. Move along, nothing to see here — unless you sue us and force it out via discovery.
