Federal prosecutors have hit JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other Wall Street giants with sweeping subpoenas in a criminal probe of whether they “debanked” customers over their politics, two sources familiar with the matter told The Post.
The demands from US Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s Washington, DC, office order the banks to cough up lists of customers they cut off and explain why their accounts were closed.
The probe, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, marks an escalation of President Trump’s criticism of the banking sector for allegedly blocking out conservatives including the First Family.
Trump has long claimed that JPMorgan and Bank of America dumped his accounts and refused to open new ones for him in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 US Capitol riots.
He also personally sued JPMorgan and CEO Jamie Dimon in January over the closures. The Trump family sued Capital One last year, claiming it axed more than 300 accounts tied to Trump businesses in 2021.
First Lady Melania Trump has said her own account was shuttered shortly after Jan. 6.
The banks deny breaking any laws and insist they don’t drop customers over politics or religion. The companies blame anti-money-laundering rules and regulatory pressure for the closures.
But earlier this year, JPMorgan admitted in court documents it shuttered accounts for Trump and several of his businesses in the wake of Jan. 6.
Reps for JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo declined to comment to The Post on Wedensday.
Pirro’s prosecutors are eyeing charges under the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989, the heavyweight fraud statute the feds used to pummel banks over toxic mortgages after the 2008 meltdown.
The law is a prosecutor’s favorite thanks to its broad reach and 10-year statute of limitations, long enough to cover the wave of account closures that followed Jan. 6.
That choice points to the probe’s biggest hurdle: it’s not obvious which law the banks broke.
Civil-rights statutes bar discrimination in lending, but banks have wide latitude over whom they do business with, and compliance rules can force them to ditch customers deemed too risky.
One source familiar with the matter slammed Pirro’s probe, accusing the former Fox News host of “grasping at straws” by trying to build a case against the banks for following federal regulations.
“No one is sitting around a table secretly deciding to debank conservatives,” the person close to the situation added.
Still, the feds believe they have a paper trail.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, an independent bureau inside the Treasury Department, said in December it found early evidence the country’s nine biggest banks had debanked customers in industries including oil and gas, coal, firearms and adult entertainment.
Officials cited the banks’ own glossy reports touting climate and racial-equity pledges.
Until now, the crackdown had been the OCC’s turf under an executive order Trump signed in August targeting “politicized or unlawful debanking.”
The order told regulators to refer cases to the attorney general, though none ever did. Pirro’s office launched its probe on its own, according to media reports, though her office and OCC are now coordinating.
The investigation puts Pirro back on familiar turf.
Democrats blasted her office’s criminal probe of then-Fed Chair Jerome Powell over the central bank’s $2.5 billion renovation, a story broken by The Post, as a political hit job.
A federal judge quashed her subpoenas before she shut down the investigation in April and punted the matter to the Fed’s inspector general.
Two of the same prosecutors now running the debanking probe, Carlton Davis and Steven Vandervelden, made an unannounced visit to the Fed’s construction site that month.
Trump has publicly hammered major US banks for years, telling Bank of America boss Brian Moynihan last year at Davos: “I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives.”
