JPMorgan Chase shut down Donald Trump's bank accounts after January 6.
Federal regulators spent a year combing through the files of every major bank in America to find out how widespread it was.
Federal investigators just handed Congress nearly half a million pages of evidence – and Republicans have a matter of weeks to use it.
Operation Choke Point Never Actually Ended and the OCC Just Proved It
The Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency spent a year reviewing 100,000 complaints and nearly 420,000 pages of documents at the nine largest banks in America.
Every single one was doing it.
JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC, TD Bank and BMO – the OCC found all nine were using "reputation risk" as grounds to deny banking services to customers for no reason other than their politics, their religion, or their legal line of work.
The OCC's Comptroller called the findings "irrefutable evidence that the nation's largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses."
The most damning example: JPMorgan's internal risk team pulled the Southern Poverty Law Center's "extremist hate group" label on a customer using WePay – JPMorgan's payment platform – and officially recommended cutting them off.
CEO Jamie Dimon's bank didn't flag a cartel or a money launderer – they flagged someone because a far-left smear outfit put them on a list.
That's America's biggest bank using the SPLC as a vetting tool to decide who gets to use their own payment system.
Trump and his companies sued JPMorgan Chase and Dimon for $5 billion, alleging the bank shut down their accounts after January 6 for purely political reasons.
Regulators have already started removing "reputation risk" from their guidelines – but a regulation is not a law, and the next Democrat in the White House flips it back on day one.
Senate Republicans Have Weeks to Pass the FIRM Act and End Operation Choke Point for Good
American Commitment president Phil Kerpen has been in front of Senate Republicans with one message: do it now or lose the chance.
Kerpen is pressing Senate Republicans to use the lame-duck session to pass one of two anti-debanking bills – either the House-passed version or its Senate companion, the FIRM Act, introduced by Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott.
The FIRM Act would permanently eliminate "reputation risk" as a supervisory tool – writing the ban directly into federal law where no future Democratic administration can touch it.
"Republicans should find a way to get the ban on reputation risk written into law in the lame duck or they may not have another chance before we have another Democratic administration that's off to the races," Kerpen told the Washington Times.
Obama launched Operation Choke Point in 2013 – using bank regulators to cut off gun dealers, payday lenders, and other businesses Democrats didn't like.
Trump killed it in 2017.
Biden brought it back as "Operation Choke Point 2.0" – using the FDIC to pressure banks against crypto firms, all while his regulators kept "reputation risk" on the books as the cudgel of choice.
Congress never codified Trump's first victory, and Biden walked right back in.
Scott's FIRM Act advanced out of committee on a partisan vote and has support from the American Bankers Association, the Bank Policy Institute, and dozens of conservative organizations.
What it doesn't have yet is a floor vote.
Senate Republicans need to get it done before January – before Democratic leadership takes the gavels in both chambers, before the next administration gets to decide which churches, gun dealers, and conservative nonprofits deserve a bank account.
Democrats are already signaling they plan to scrutinize and punish corporations that did business with the Trump administration.
The OCC confirmed it. Trump's executive order started fixing it, but executive orders get reversed the moment a new president takes office.
Republicans have the votes, the proof, and a matter of weeks to make this permanent.
Sources:
- Phil Kerpen and David Sherfinski, "GOP Congress Lobbied to Write Reputation Risk Ban Into Law Before Democrats Take Over," The Washington Times, November 9, 2026.
- Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, "OCC Releases Report on Large Banks' Debanking Activities," OCC.gov, October 14, 2026.
- John Kennedy and Tim Scott, "Kennedy, Scott, Banking Republicans Introduce Bill to Protect Law-Abiding Americans from Debanking," Kennedy.senate.gov, March 6, 2025.
- Fox Business, "Bank Executives Blow the Whistle on How Obama, Biden Admins Pressured Them to Debank Conservatives," Fox Business, 2025.
- The Washington Times, "Senate Banking Committee Seeks Ways to Reduce Political Debanking," The Washington Times, February 5, 2025.
