For years, President Trump has complained that his personal and business bank accounts were deliberately closed after the Jan 6., 2021, attack on the Capitol.
JPMorgan Chase is now admitting that did happen.
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 of 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.
The issue of whether and why the nation’s largest banks took action against Mr. Trump has become a matter of public importance because the president has frequently invoked his personal experience in pushing for a broad crackdown on “debanking.” Bank executives have capitalized on his enthusiasm for the issue to push successfully for looser enforcement by federal agencies of rules and regulations that instruct lenders to scrutinize their clients for reputational risk, among other issues.
JPMorgan, until now, had gone to lengths to avoid addressing whether it had actually closed Mr. Trump’s accounts. In a statement last month, it described the lawsuit as without merits but did not address the specifics of Mr. Trump’s allegations. A bank spokeswoman said then that as a rule, JPMorgan closed accounts “because they create legal or regulatory risk for the company.”
The JPMorgan spokeswoman and a lawyer for Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday.
There is still much legal wrangling to come. JPMorgan this past week asked that the case be moved from Florida state court, where Mr. Trump has had some success in litigation, to a federal court in New York.
Rob Copeland is a finance reporter for The Times, writing about Wall Street and the banking industry.
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