A new Treasury Department report shows the Southern Poverty Law Center helped push major banks to cut off conservative groups, even as federal prosecutors charge the SPLC with fraud.
Federal banking regulators say America’s largest banks shut out lawful customers over politics and religion, and a new review puts the Southern Poverty Law Center at the center of that pressure. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released the findings last week, detailing how financial firms denied service under loose “reputational risk” rules.
Just the News reported that the OCC review shows the SPLC was a driving force behind the debanking of conservative organizations before the group faced federal fraud charges. Many of the targeted outfits had already been labeled hate groups by the SPLC. Banks, the report found, largely lacked clear, measurable standards for deciding who posed a reputational threat.
That gap left room for ideology to do the work credit risk never required.
Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould did not mince words about what the agency found.
"Today’s report provides irrefutable evidence that the nation’s largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses,"
Gould said. He added that Americans should have access to financial services regardless of beliefs, affiliations, or political views, and that fair access is “not a mantra, it is a mandate.” The Trump administration, he said, is committed to ending the weaponization of finance against hardworking Americans.
Breitbart reported that the OCC investigation reviewed nearly 100,000 complaints and hundreds of thousands of pages of bank records covering 2020 through September 2025. The review named major institutions including JPMorgan Chase, PNC, Wells Fargo, and Capital One in denials or account closures tied to political or religious views. Banks screened for terms such as “MAGA” and “America First,” and restricted industries including firearms, coal, private prisons, and digital assets, often over anticipated activist or political pressure rather than ordinary credit risk.
One internal PNC note captured the mindset. An employee wrote that it became “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 staff, the same reporting showed, cited the prospect of heavier Biden-era supervisory pressure when turning away firearms customers.
The OCC report did more than catalog vague “values” language. It documented how SPLC designations fed bank decisions to drop customers. Conservative organizations, Christian groups, and merchants selling Trump-related goods found themselves locked out after reputation-risk policies kicked in.
The New York Post reported that the OCC examined roughly 100,000 complaints and tens of thousands of internal bank records and concluded large banks debanked customers based on political, social, or religious beliefs. Named banks included JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC, TD Bank, and BMO. Reputation risk, negative press, protests, SPLC criticism, and fear of regulator or politician reprisals, was used to justify the cuts. JPMorgan’s WePay arm flagged and closed merchants for MAGA and America First merchandise and closed accounts linked to religious groups the SPLC had labeled hate groups.
CFPB Acting Director Mark Paoletta called the pattern appalling, saying banks targeted American consumers for beliefs that did not align with the Biden administration or its leftist allies. Regulators also noted that reforms remain incomplete even after a Trump executive order against politicized debanking, and the CFPB has opened its own investigation.
The report also recorded damage to industries hit hardest by the practice. When banks treat political disagreement as a balance-sheet threat, whole lines of lawful business feel the squeeze.
The same period brought a separate federal blow. The Department of Justice charged the SPLC with fraud, alleging the group cheated donors by paying exorbitant sums to members of extremist groups, both to act as informants and to recruit and expand those operations.
The SPLC rejected the case in full.
"The charges against the SPLC are provably wrong; they are based on inaccurate facts and a misapplication of law. Our informant program was successful in accomplishing its purposes: Threats and attacks were prevented, criminal activity was stopped, and information was gathered to dismantle the efforts of hate and extremist groups."
That is the group’s public line. Prosecutors say donors were misled about how their money was used. Both claims now sit before the courts; the OCC findings stand on their own documentary record of bank behavior.
Conservatives have long accused the SPLC of branding mainstream right-of-center figures and groups as extremists. Criticism has not come only from the right. Writer Ken Silverstein tracked founder Morris Dees for years in outlets including Harper’s and The New Yorker, and Dees was later expelled from the organization he built. The new banking report puts a sharper practical cost on those labels: lost accounts, canceled cards, and closed credit.
Some states have already passed laws aimed at stopping banks from cutting customers over politics or religion. Alliance Defending Freedom’s Matt Sharp, appearing on “Just the News, No Noise,” called the Trump administration’s crackdown on debanking “a huge win for every single American.”
"So, I think the first step we can do is [hold] them accountable is one of the best things we can do to make sure that this never happens again, and that those that were harmed by it can rest assured that they will never face debanking again,"
Sharp said. He added that people should never have to worry about a credit card or loan being canceled because of religious or political beliefs, and that accountability is the next step. He also noted that states with new laws are looking at tools not only against banks but against the SPLC and others “that were behind a lot of this ideological warfare against people by shutting down their accounts.”
Gould’s message matched that demand for a clean rule: lawful businesses and ordinary customers should not lose banking access because a pressure group or a political fashion marked them as untouchable. Fair access, in his words, is a mandate.
The OCC paper shows how far that mandate was ignored. Banks without hard metrics for “reputational risk” outsourced judgment to activist blacklists. Conservative and Christian customers paid the price in closed accounts and denied credit. The SPLC’s labels appear again and again in that trail. Federal charges over donor funds raise a second question about the same organization’s trustworthiness. Courts will sort the fraud case. The banking record is already on paper. Taxpayers and customers have a right to expect that political screening ends, and that the groups and institutions that ran it face real consequences.
