Major U.S. banks denied accounts and credit to conservatives, Christian groups, and Trump-related businesses over politics and faith, a federal OCC review has now documented.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released a report this week finding that the nation’s largest banks closed accounts, rejected financing, and screened out lawful customers based on political views, religious beliefs, and so-called reputation risk.
Comptroller Jonathan Gould said the findings leave little room for denial. President Donald Trump ordered the probe as part of an effort to end politically motivated debanking, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau separately said it will investigate consumer harm tied to the same practices.
The review covered activity from 2020 through September 2025. Examiners went through nearly 100,000 complaints, hundreds of individual decisions, and roughly 420,000 pages of bank documents across nine national banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC, TD Bank, and BMO.
In a statement accompanying the report, Gould did not say much about what the files showed.
"Today’s report provides irrefutable evidence that the nation’s largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses,"
Just The News reported Gould’s assessment alongside the agency’s finding that banks used reputation-risk and industry screens to wall off disfavored customers and sectors.
All nine banks reviewed maintained policies that restricted services or required heightened scrutiny based on reputation risk or industry category. JPMorgan Chase, PNC, Wells Fargo, and Capital One appear in completed denials or closures tied to political or religious views. Cases involving Citibank and Bank of America more often turned on industry restrictions and other reputation-risk calls rather than a customer’s stated party or faith.
Restricted industries listed in the review included Arctic oil and gas, coal mining and coal-fired power, firearms and ammunition, private prisons and detention facilities, tobacco and e-cigarettes, and digital assets. In plain terms, banks built internal gates around lawful businesses that progressive activists and prior regulators had marked as politically inconvenient.
Breitbart News detailed how JPMorgan’s Silicon Valley payments arm, WePay, became a flash point. Acquired by the bank in 2017, WePay used screening terms that included “MAGA,” “Make America Great,” and “America First.”
In February 2021, WePay closed a merchant account selling Trump merchandise. An employee explanation cited “MAGA and Trump-related items” among the violations. That same year, WePay closed an account raising funds for a legal challenge by a devout Christian to certain anti-discrimination laws. Internal notes also labeled a religious nonprofit a “[r]ight wing religious conservative non profit with strong anti LGBTQ rhetoric.”
The OCC found that neither WePay nor JPMorgan had formal written standards for judging alleged promotion of hate or violence, even as employees applied those labels to shut people off. From 2021 to 2023, JPMorgan repeatedly declined commercial services to a conservative retailer. Internal tracking later saw employees strip out descriptions such as “right-wing” and “extreme clients,” and in 2023 an employee removed references to an organization being “right wing” and “religious.”
A JPMorgan spokesperson told the New York Post the bank had identified problems at WePay and ended the business.
"We identified it, corrected it, and the business no longer operates,"
The same spokesperson added that bank policies “prohibit discrimination against customers based on political or religious views.” To Bloomberg, JPMorgan framed the broader climate this way: years of second-guessing by regulators “contributed to a culture of caution across the banking industry. That system needs fixing.”
Late in 2021, PNC declined a credit line to a media company after employees objected to the owners’ conservative views and public affiliations. One internal note put the bank’s posture in blunt terms.
"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,"
Wells Fargo pressed a payment intermediary about a religious nonprofit. Services were terminated; reinstatement was later offered and declined. In handling reputation questions, Wells pointed staff toward the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and BloodMoney.org as resources while saying it offered no specific endorsement. A card network also sent Wells a list of about 60 “potentially problematic” merchants after a highly publicized political event, pressure the OCC flagged as a catalyst and suggested other agencies may need to examine.
On firearms, Wells employees wrote in 2024 that “Under the Biden administration, banks could face greater supervisory pressure to move away from lending to the firearms industry.” Opportunities were declined. Capital One treated partisan activity as presumptively high reputation risk and rejected groups across the spectrum, including abortion-rights organizations, a public-education political arm that endorsed Democrats, and a gun-rights group. The pattern was not neutral risk management. It was politics embedded in credit decisions.
The New York Post reported the same core record: banks closed accounts of MAGA merchants, pro-life advocates, and other conservative and Christian customers disfavored during the Biden years, often under reputation-risk banners and third-party designations. CFPB Acting Director Mark Paoletta condemned the targeting.
"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."
Citibank declined coal-dependent electricity financing and a firearms IPO that failed internal gun-sales standards. In June 2025, Citi publicly said it would eliminate its firearms policy and bar discrimination based on political affiliation in its employee code and financial-access rules.
Bank of America wound down private-prison relationships, then months into Trump’s return sought to restore a relationship even though the report said reputation-risk factors had not materially changed. TD Bank prepared to reject an anti-immigration nonprofit’s PPP application over a values conflict and SPLC designation; the group withdrew as ineligible. TD also flagged pro-life and faith-based organizations for reputation-risk review. BMO required firearms-related customers to keep tactical-product sales below 30 percent of total sales or face a transition out. U.S. Bank closed aviation company accounts after an old report alleged participation in a controversial government program.
Several banks leaned on designations and watchlists rather than individualized credit analysis. The report notes that the SPLC later faced a grand jury fraud indictment, context that matters when banks treat activist scorecards as if they were neutral underwriting tools.
Federal supervisors have already moved to pull politics out of routine bank exams. In April, the OCC and FDIC issued a final rule barring supervisory criticism based on reputation risk and barring pressure to deny services over protected beliefs or politically disfavored lawful activities. In June 2025, the Federal Reserve announced it would remove reputation risk from examinations. In September 2025, OCC guidance said politicized or unlawful debanking can factor into licensing applications and Community Reinvestment Act evaluations, the scorecard that weighs how banks serve their communities when they seek mergers and expansions.
A December 2025 public approval of PNC’s acquisition of FirstBank included fair-access language: restrictions should rest on individualized, objective, risk-based analysis rather than environmental, social-impact, or reputation-risk judgments as the primary driver. The OCC is weighing more rules, bringing debanking records into merger and community-lending reviews, and creating a path for customers to obtain confidential supervisory information for private litigation. The report itself announced no bank-specific enforcement penalties.
The Bank Policy Institute, speaking for the industry, stressed support for fair access while defending sound risk management.
"The banking industry supports fair access to banking services and has been working to ensure that government regulations and policies enable banks to serve law-abiding customers,"
BPI added that it backs “clear and consistent standards that promote access while maintaining sound risk management, including the administration’s recent efforts to prioritize supervisory attention on material financial risk and rather than reputational risk,” and said it looks forward to work with the administration and Congress so “political or religious beliefs do not unfairly affect customers’ access to banking services.”
On the same Wednesday the OCC report landed, the CFPB said it would examine compliance with federal consumer financial laws and address harm from these practices. That matters for ordinary customers who lost donation processing, credit lines, or merchant accounts and had little practical recourse while internal emails treated their politics or faith as a compliance problem.
The mechanism was rarely a single dramatic order. It was cumulative: screening lists, reputation committees, industry exit policies, intermediary pressure, and employee notes that equated conservative speech or Christian teaching with brand danger. When the political weather changed, some of the same institutions softened firearms rules, reopened prison-industry talks, or rewrote fair-access pledges. Credit decisions that shift with the party in power are not neutral banking.
Lawful businesses selling merchandise, raising legal funds, operating media outlets, manufacturing firearms, or running faith-based charities should be judged on fraud risk, capital, and repayment, not on whether a relationship manager likes their voters or their pews. The OCC file shows how far that basic standard slipped, and how long customers were told to accept it as prudence.
Americans who pay their bills and obey the law should not need a permission slip from a reputation committee to hold an account, and regulators finally put that failure on paper.
