Someone inside JPMorgan Chase's payment business built a screening system and told it to hunt for three phrases: "MAGA," "Make America Great," and "America First."
WePay, the JPMorgan-owned payment processor, added some of those terms after January 6, 2021. Once they were on the list, the system started flagging Americans.
WePay shut down a merchant selling Trump and MAGA merchandise and declared that the products "promote[d] hate, violence, or racial intolerance." It went after another merchant selling "conservative/republican t-shirts, hats, etc." That merchant's flagged items included a "Trump-Won" flag, a "Biden-Illegitimate" T-shirt, and a "The-Big-Lie" sticker. WePay closed that account too.
If you got a letter during those years saying your bank had "decided to end the relationship" after a review, with no explanation and no appeal, you were never told why. Now there's a federal report that answers that question with the banks' own words.
On October 14, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released a 47-page report titled "Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans." Investigators went through nearly 100,000 complaints and about 420,000 pages of internal bank documents.
They found that all nine of the largest banks the OCC supervises kept policies from 2020 through September 2025 that cut off or restricted customers based on their political, religious, or social views. The nine are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC, TD Bank, and BMO.
"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 Gould.
Irrefutable is the government's own word for it.
The banks' favorite justification was "reputation risk." In practice, that meant keeping hostile reporters, left-wing activist groups like the SPLC, and Biden-era regulators happy. The record shows which customers paid the price.
Wells Fargo put it in writing. A reputation-risk review warned: "Under the Biden administration, banks could face greater supervisory pressure to move away from lending to the firearms industry." Wells Fargo then turned down loans to two lawful firearms businesses.
Capital One turned away a gun-rights organization "due to optics that we endorsed its position."
PNC went further. A successful media company applied for a line of credit. The bank's ESG team noted that one owner's foundation "has funded several Christian conservative groups" and that another owner was "a conservative political commentator."
One PNC employee wrote that the owners held opinions "very contrary to PNC's beliefs/values." Another wrote, "I think it becomes really difficult to justify aligning ourselves with a company whose owners have built very public personas." PNC denied the credit.
At PNC, giving money to Christians made you a credit risk.
Wells Fargo also pressured a payment processor to drop a religious nonprofit over its position on same-sex marriage. WePay closed an account raising money for a "devout Christian" challenging anti-discrimination laws in court. It shut down another religious nonprofit that its staff described as "right wing religious conservative" with "strong anti LGBTQ rhetoric."
The Southern Poverty Law Center had slapped its "extremist hate group" label on that last group. According to the report, banks regularly used SPLC designations to decide which customers to drop. FBI Director Kash Patel has called the SPLC a "partisan smear machine."
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, using bank accounts opened in the names of fictitious entities.
So America's biggest banks screened Christians using the labels of a group now charged with lying to banks.
Sam Brownback found out how this works years before the report came out. Brownback is the former Kansas governor who served as President Trump's ambassador for international religious freedom. In 2022, Chase closed the bank account of his National Committee for Religious Freedom three weeks after it was opened.
According to Brownback, Chase then offered to consider reopening the account if the group disclosed who gave more than 10% of its funding and how it decided which candidates to support. At the time, a Chase spokesperson said the bank "would never close an account due to one's political or religious affiliation."
The report now shows what JPMorgan's own payment business was doing during those same years.
A bank cut off an event organizer whose social media posts called Black Lives Matter "Marxists" and called President Biden and Anthony Fauci "the enemy." Bank staff branded the posts "an incitement of hate." Banks also choked off lawful businesses in firearms, oil and coal, and private prisons.
Bank of America cut off private prison companies over "changing policymaker attitudes." A few months into President Trump's second term, once the policymakers changed, it tried to restore one of those accounts. This is the same bank whose CEO, Brian Moynihan, was challenged by Trump at Davos in January 2025: "I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives." Bank of America's answer was that it "never close[s] accounts for political reasons."
Trump knew this was happening long before the report confirmed it. Banks cut off his family and businesses after January 6. He's suing JPMorgan over it.
He also did something about it. In March 2025, his OCC stopped treating "reputation risk" as a category in bank examinations, and the Federal Reserve followed in June. On August 7, 2025, Trump signed the executive order that launched this investigation. A new rule now bars federal regulators from pressuring banks to drop customers over "reputational" concerns.
When the OCC's preliminary findings came out last December, Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin called them a "nothing burger." The final report includes the employee emails, the keyword list, and the Wells Fargo memo naming the Biden administration.
The banks' defenders will point to one detail: Capital One also turned down an abortion-rights group it called "synonymous with abortion and the Dems." On the other side of the ledger are Christian ministries, gun shops, Trump merchandise sellers, a gun-rights group, and a media company whose offense was funding Christians.
A bakery can pick its customers. These banks hold federally insured deposits, borrow from the Federal Reserve, and operate with taxpayers standing behind them. They used those privileges to decide which lawful Americans got to have a bank account.
All nine banks now say they've revised their policies. The OCC says that isn't enough, because none of them has "fully and publicly acknowledged" its "weaponization of finance against hardworking Americans." JPMorgan, the bank that built the watch list, says WePay's practices "failed to meet its standards" and that the operation has been shut down.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has opened its own investigation. "It is appalling that these banks targeted American consumers for their political, social, or religious beliefs," said acting CFPB Director Mark Paoletta. The OCC says debanking will now count against banks when they apply for licenses and in their community-lending ratings. Penalties haven't been announced — yet.
"Fair access to financial services is not a mantra," Gould said. "It is a mandate."
If one of these banks closed your account or turned you down, the government now wants to hear from you. 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.
For years, conservatives who said their banks were coming after them were told they were paranoid. The banks' own emails say they were right.
A few years ago, a computer at the country's largest bank was programmed to treat "America First" as a warning sign. Today, the government that bank answers to is run by the man who made the phrase famous.