On January 16, 2021, ten days after January 6, an email from FinCEN, the Treasury Department bureaucracy that monitors bank transactions, landed with top officials at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citibank.
Attached was a report called "Bankrolling Bigotry: An Overview of the Online Funding Strategies of American Hate Groups." Drawing on designations from the Southern Poverty Law Center, it listed Alliance Defending Freedom, Liberty Counsel, the Family Research Council, the Ruth Institute, and the American College of Pediatricians alongside white supremacist and Holocaust-denial groups. It urged that "hate groups" be cut off from online funding.
Alliance Defending Freedom has won case after case at the U.S. Supreme Court. The SPLC labeled it a hate group anyway, and that label landed with America's four biggest banks.
A new federal report shows what those banks, and five others, did over the next four and a half years.
On October 14, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released "Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans." It examined the nine largest national banks it supervises: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC Bank, TD Bank, and BMO Bank. All nine kept policies from 2020 through September 2025 that could deny or limit services based on a customer's political, religious, or social views.
Investigators went through nearly 100,000 complaints and about 50,000 internal bank records. "Today's report provides irrefutable evidence that the nation's largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses," said Comptroller Jonathan V. Gould.
The banks' cover story was "reputation risk," and the report shows where that risk came from: pressure from Biden-era regulators, threats of bad press, and campaigns by left-wing activist groups. The SPLC was the most useful of those groups, because banks used its "hate group" labels to decide which customers to drop.
WePay, JPMorgan's payment processor, closed a religious nonprofit after the SPLC labeled it an "extremist hate group." Staff described it as a "right wing religious conservative non profit with strong anti LGBTQ rhetoric." During the pandemic, an SPLC label helped TD Bank deny a COVID emergency loan to a nonprofit that pushes for limits on immigration.
In April, a federal grand jury indicted the SPLC on 11 counts, including wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank. Prosecutors say it secretly paid more than $3 million to informants tied to the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups through bank accounts opened in fictitious names.
So the group whose labels told banks who was too dangerous to serve now stands accused of lying to banks.
Trump supporters were targets from the start. In February 2021, a small business owner selling Trump hats and MAGA T-shirts found their WePay account closed. WePay claimed the merchandise promoted "hate, violence, or racial intolerance."
WePay's screening list flagged "MAGA," "Make America Great," and "America First." An employee explained the closure in writing: "MAGA and Trump-related items are part of it." WePay later shut down another merchant selling "conservative/republican t-shirts, hats, etc."
Meanwhile, JPMorgan held on to a wealthy client facing drug and weapons charges. Regulators say the money that client brought in appeared to influence the decision.
Christians were next. Wells Fargo pressured a payment processor to drop a religious nonprofit over its position on same-sex marriage. PNC refused credit to a media company after noting that an owner's foundation "has funded several Christian conservative groups." WePay closed an account raising money for a "devout Christian" challenging anti-discrimination laws in court.
Gun owners were never in the running. A Wells Fargo review warned that "under the Biden administration, banks could face greater supervisory pressure to move away from lending to the firearms industry," and Wells Fargo turned the lawful gun businesses down. Capital One rejected a gun-rights group over "optics."
The banks' defenders will point to two cases. One bank declined a public education group in 2023 because it endorsed only Democrats, and Capital One noted that a pro-abortion group's political giving was "about 95% Democrat." What those cases show is that the banks were tracking customers' politics. The rest of the report shows who got punished for it: Trump supporters, Christians, gun owners, and anyone with an SPLC label.
All nine banks now claim they've reformed. The OCC found that some just "rebranded the risk as a 'franchise' or 'brand' risk," and that "no bank has fully and publicly acknowledged its past debanking decisions." Gould's verdict was "I am not confident that they will be enough."
Acting CFPB Director Mark Paoletta named who the banks were serving. "It is appalling that these banks targeted American consumers for their political, social, or religious beliefs that did not align with the Biden Administration or its leftist allies," he said. "These thuggish tactics, which were also a defining feature of the Biden-Chopra CFPB, have no place in America." His bureau has opened its own investigation.
President Trump knows this firsthand. Banks cut off his own family after January 6, and he's suing JPMorgan over it.
On August 7, 2025, he signed the executive order that launched this investigation. His administration has since stripped "reputation risk" out of federal bank examinations and adopted a rule barring regulators from pressuring banks to drop customers over it. The OCC says it is "considering actions to prevent banks from discriminating against customers or prospective customers on the basis of their political or religious beliefs."
For years, the Americans who said their banks were coming after them were dismissed as paranoid. The banks' own records now prove them right.
If one of these banks closed your account or turned you down, you can file a complaint with the OCC at HelpWithMyBank.gov or by calling 800-613-6743, and with the CFPB at consumerfinance.gov/complaint.
Social media bans cost people their platforms. This cost people their bank accounts, and the blacklist behind it came from a group now charged with defrauding banks.