https://www.thefp.com/p/debanking-investigation-trump-rupa-subramanya?utm_campaign=realclearpoliticsDebanking Took Hold Inside the Biggest BanksA federal investigation found that ‘reputation risk’ was used as a guise by employees to banish some customers seen as too conservative or controversial.October 14, 2026Only two years ago, the idea that some Americans were being “debanked,” or cut off from financial institutions after being deemed politically incorrect, extreme, or dangerous, was often dismissed as a conspiracy or an accident.
But federal regulators announced on Wednesday that they had reached a very different conclusion: Debanking really did happen.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said that nine of the nation’s largest banks, as measured by assets, had policies in place between 2020 and 2025 that may have influenced their decisions to “deny or limit access to financial services” to customers or potential customers “based on their political or religious beliefs or lawful business activities.”
The findings are based on a yearlong review that included about 50,000 internal bank documents and hundreds of individual bank decisions. Among the banks scrutinized by the OCC are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, and Wells Fargo.
The investigation was triggered by an executive order issued in August 2025 by President Donald Trump, who said that the targets of debanking “have suffered frozen payrolls, debt, and crushing interest, and other significant harms to their livelihoods, reputations, and financial well-being.”
In particular, Trump criticized “Operation Choke Point,” a Justice Department initiative launched during the Obama administration targeting banks whose clients included legal weapons distributors and payday lenders. The Trump administration ended Operation Choke Point in 2017.
The OCC’s 47-page report did not specify the total number of debanking examples uncovered by regulators. But the individual examples detailed in the report echoed the findings in my investigation of debanking for The Free Press in 2024, including the testimony of a whistleblower who told me that Bank of America had voluntarily given information to the government after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, including information about customers who made purchases in the Washington, D.C., area around that date and had previously purchased firearms or ammunition.
In one example detailed by the OCC, in 2021 an unidentified media company applied to PNC Bank for a line of credit. The application was denied, despite the company’s relationship manager at PNC saying that the company was continuing to “grow and perform.” The OCC said it found no specific credit problem that led to the rejection. Instead, the denial was based on “reputation risk concerns.”
As the report explains, bank employees described one of the company’s owners as “a conservative political commentator,” and pointed out that another owner had a foundation that supported Christian conservative organizations, some of which the Southern Poverty Law Center had labeled “hate groups.”
“I think it becomes really difficult to justify aligning ourselves with a company whose owners have built very public personas around opinions very contrary to PNC’s beliefs/values,” one bank employee wrote. Under the banner of “reputation risk,” PNC employees were allowed by the bank to consider what the media, activists, politicians, shareholders, and the public might think about customers. PNC declined to comment on Wednesday.
Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group, said that the “landmark report” removes much of the ambiguity that surrounded debanking when I investigated it two years ago. “We finally have the receipts,” Tedesco said on Wednesday. “The banks were policing speech and the marketplace of ideas.”
Some of the banks themselves acknowledged how debanking happened. One unidentified bank told the OCC that because reputational risk depended on perception, it was difficult to define every situation that should be scrutinized by employees. Another bank conceded that there could be “no definitive checklist.” The OCC concluded that the nine banks “largely lacked clear and measurable standards and objective risk-based criteria” for evaluating reputational risks.
ReadThe Debanking of America
The banks also had an explanation for why they made some decisions that hurt customers or potential customers: The banks were under pressure from the outside. One unidentified bank told the OCC that restrictions on businesses linked to firearms, immigration detention centers, and fossil fuels were a reflection of “significant external pressure,” including congressional oversight, activist campaigns, and scrutiny from state and local government officials.
In 2024, for example, Wells Fargo employees considering whether to do business with a firearms company described the prospect of lending to the industry as “a controversial and highly partisan issue,” according to Wednesday’s report. “Under the Biden administration,” the employees continued, “banks could face greater supervisory pressure to move away from lending to the firearms industry.” Bank employees also worried about criticism from activists and members of Congress.
In the end, Wells Fargo, based in San Francisco, declined to do business with the firearms company, citing the limited revenue it would generate as one reason for the decision. Wells Fargo referred my request for comment to the Bank Policy Institute (BPI), an industry group. The BPI said that it supports “continued engagement with the administration and Congress as they consider additional proposals that ensure that political or religious beliefs do not unfairly affect customers’ access to banking services.”
The OCC also found that JPMorgan repeatedly declined to offer commercial services to a conservative-leaning retailer between 2021 and 2023. Each time a new opportunity arose, the bank’s reputation-risk employees flagged concerns about “negative attention from people with differing/opposing values.” Employees recorded their assessments and the bank’s decisions in an internal tracking system. Those records referred to “right-wing” and “far-right” companies, and accused a company of promoting “tasteless, gun-centric videos.”
WePay, a payment processor owned by JPMorgan, monitored companies for compliance with its terms of service using a list of screening terms, including MAGA, Make America Great, and America First. Some of these terms were added after January 6, 2021. In February 2021, WePay closed the account of a merchant selling Trump and MAGA merchandise after deciding that the products promoted “hate, violence, or racial intolerance,” according to the report. Another Republican merchant was flagged over a “Trump Won” flag, a T-shirt calling President Joe Biden “illegitimate,” and a “Big Lie” sticker. That business’s account was closed, too. WePay also closed the account of a nonprofit group that was described as a “right-wing religious conservative nonprofit with strong anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.”
A JPMorgan spokesperson told The Free Press that a process used by WePay “did not meet our expectations,” and that WePay is no longer in operation. The spokesperson also said that bank policies prohibit discrimination against customers based on political or religious views, and that JPMorgan agrees with the Trump administration that “years of operating in a regulatory environment that often second-guessed decisions contributed to a culture of caution across the banking industry. That system needs fixing.”
During my reporting in 2024, I spoke to people from across the political spectrum who were debanked, including a Muslim entrepreneur whose crowdfunding platform lost its payment processor. Another example was Sam Brownback, the former Republican governor of Kansas, whose nonprofit, the National Committee for Religious Freedom, had its account closed by JPMorgan in 2022. The bank didn’t explain its decision at the time but said it would reconsider if the nonprofit provided information about its donors and intended recipients. Brownback refused.
On Wednesday, Brownback told me that the OCC’s findings are “vindication.” “The banking system was being used to achieve a political objective,” he added. While debanking appeared to be “mostly focused at the right during the Biden administration,” he warned that it also has a “huge potential negative impact on the left, if the shoe happens to be on the other foot.”
Brownback said that he hopes the investigation will “drive a stake in the heart of this pernicious practice” so that it can’t return during a future presidential administration. “Nobody should want this sort of picking of political sides by our banking system.”
