Posted on 10/15/2026 7:24:56 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Only 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.
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.”
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The 0bama Administration used the Justice Department and their Operation Choke Point to pressure banks to close accounts and freeze funds of known conservatives. They even closed Trump Organization bank accounts.
The federal regulators need to hit these banks hard with fines. Painful ones. That will inject some spine into the CEOs to put a stop to this crap. Otherwise they’ll keep doing it.
This is where a modern indoctrination system really takes its toll.
Such a shame, if only Republicans controlled the government, they could punish these wrongdoers. /s
What about civil lawsuits?
I know it’s probably not worth it for most people because you have to be able to claim you were harmed in some measurable way, but still, does Marsha Blackburn have to do everything??? lol
Probably class action lawsuits would be the way to go in cases like this where there is a large class of people affected.
The DoJ should go after the banks and the “decision” makers in those banks who defunded organizations for political or religious discrimination reason for civil rights violations. The banks shouild face huge fines. The individuals should face heavy fines, jail time, and being banned for life from any job in any financial industry.
The reason bank can continue to screw citizens eight ways to Tuesday is the evil partnership between banks and the government.
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.”
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I have to wonder if SOMETHING SIMILAR HAS BEEN GOING ON WITH FREEREPUBLIC’S CREDIT CARD SERVICE PROVIDER.
This is the reason I now have 3 different banks, along with CashApp, Venmo, PayPal, & bitcoin. I am keeping multiple options open.
The days of putting all your money in one place and they will take care of you is over.
Ummm. I’m thinking, no. The civil rights laws don’t cover viewpoint discrimination. I think that this practice isn’t civilly actionable at all, and certainly not criminally actionable
You got it!
“The federal regulators need to hit these banks hard with fines. Painful ones. That will inject some spine into the CEOs to put a stop to this crap. Otherwise they’ll keep doing it.”
It won’t - banks are HIGHLY REGULATED by the feds, they will ALWAYS do what they’re told, at least if the feds are run by Leftists, as they know Leftists will make them pay if they don’t comply, whereas the banks always have the option of running to media should a Conservative try that stunt.
But the people in government, the ones who gave orders to the banks, EVERY ONE OF THEM, down to the janitors (if involved), needs to be thrown in jail...but won’t be.
Trump needs to go after the individuals who pushed it...
“had policies in place” “reputation risk concerns.”
Not just banks, but many corporations have “guidelines”. They typically have a look up table in the database that has both positive and negative flags of various degrees of severity.
Example 1: My wife goes to Mexico for a few weeks and comes back frequently. Wells Fargo put her in a database table with the code of a suspected drug dealer solely because her travel behavior was typical of a drug dealer.
Example2 : I worked for the City of Chicago IT Dept. They had a system of “codes” in the database tables to indicate the political connections of everyone...their relation to ward committemen was the most common. My relation 10 years earlier to muck raking Daily News columnist Mike Royko was still in there with the eqyuivalent code “Do not solicit bribe from this guy” because Mike Royko had written columns about my experience with a building inspector who had solicited bribes from me.
Example3: In the private sector Allstate, State Farm, other insurance companies have “reputation risk” flags. They might avoid houses of prostitution or anything that might give them bad publicity. At State Farm I worked beside an Antifa type IT guy with a weird sense of humor. He would go beyond the typical test cases of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and categorize right wing groups (gun nuts) in his vocabulary with high risk scores. Then sometimes that test data would find its way into the operational database. To him it was a “practical joke”.
I’ve worked IT in many Fortune 100 and government. All data bases are “dirty”. Some databases are dirtier than others. Some experience a “clean up” Once a month, or once a year, or when some manager says to clean it up.... which is always after the embarrassig story in the newspaper and not before despite whistleblowers warning of the risk.
By far government databases are much dirtier than any Fortune 100 I have seen. In talking with IRS consultants they claim that IRS databases are the dirtiest of all. Given the examples they told me, I believe it.
Currently I am focused on the Welfare IES Integrated Eligibility System database system which is the single biggest fraud and the dirtiest in Welfare. Not only is it fraud but it makes the fraud of others possible. Its garbage data makes WASTE of those trying to process its garbage data also very big.
Its welfare covers Medicaid, CHIP, SNAP, WIC, TANF, Sec8, LIHEAP, etc.
Since it appears that FR was recently de-banked, it may be a good time for the FR lawyer to stop by that bank and mention these new investigations and penalties to the FR banking officer.
The federal regulators need to hit these banks hard with fines. Painful ones. That will inject some spine into the CEOs to put a stop to this crap. Otherwise they’ll keep doing it.
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Won’t work.
Wells Fargo has been fined several times that I remember for illegal practices. They just pay the fine and move on.
The top three layers need to be incarcerated. Then they’ll stop.
” hit these banks hard with fines”
...not good enough...and won’t work if we get out of power at some point.
If they are large banks they need to be broken up into pieces.
The punishment needs to meet the severity of the crime—and be permanent in nature.
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