Jamie Dimon may be the defendant in President Donald Trump’s latest lawsuit, but the JPMorgan Chase CEO isn’t the president’s actual target in a case that ought to be understood as a fishing expedition. On paper, Trump is suing Dimon and his bank for allegedly debanking his personal and business accounts in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots “as a result of political and social motivations.”
In JPMC’s response to the $5 billion suit, the bank did not deny that it debanked a number of accounts associated with Trump, but instead that it only ever deactivated accounts “because they create legal or regulatory risk for the company” rather than for political bias.
For a moment, put on your tinfoil cap and consider the possibility that Trump and JPMC may both be telling the truth: The bank may have booted Trump after Jan. 6 not because of the company’s political agenda, but due to the “legal or regulatory risk” posited by the tidal wave of lawfare against Trump launched by Joe Biden‘s Justice Department and progressive prosecutors in Manhattan and Fulton County, Georgia. The lawsuit, which does not actually allege that JPMC violated any law in deactivating the Trump accounts — and indeed, big banks usually reserve the right to terminate accounts without cause — may really be a fact-finding mission in Trump’s crusade to expose the extent of the lawfare against him, with Dimon and JPMC as mere collateral damage.
We already know that Jack Smith succeeded in steamrolling private industries to secretly hand over highly personal evidence, ranging from the phone records of Republican lawmakers to Trump’s private Twitter messages. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that finance would be on the special counsel’s radar, and unlike social media giants, which theoretically had First Amendment protections that the Justice Department disturbingly overran, commercial banking is already one of the most regulated private industries.
Long before the Biden administration’s lawfare, existing federal regulations, such as the Bank Secrecy Act, encouraged banks to arbitrarily debank accounts for any perceived irregularities while banning said banks from informing cutoff customers as to why they’re doing so. The law effectively deputizes banks to enforce federal financial regulations, meaning that if banks fail to find financial criminals using their services, the banks themselves could be in serious legal jeopardy. Tack on the trigger-happy prosecutors out for Trump’s blood, and it stands to reason that JPMC could be justifiably concerned that a failure to even preemptively block Trump from the bank would earn it, at minimum, the sort of federal scrutiny that amounts to millions in increased compliance costs.
The real question to be answered in discovery is whether JPMC simply anticipated pressure from the federal officials to debank Trump, or whether prosecutors had suggested or demanded that it do so. In the case of the former, Trump could be rewarded with the momentary humiliation of JPMC and its legendary CEO. But if the bank was simply bowing to explicit pressure from the Biden administration, Trump will have won a political prize a hell of a lot larger than one bank’s reputation.