Attorneys Challenge Bank Of America’s Claims It Doesn’t Discriminate Against Conservatives

 After President Trump publicly called out Bank of America’s CEO, the company strenuously denies it has ever refused service to Americans who disagree with Democrats.

After President Trump called out Bank of America’s CEO Thursday for debanking conservatives, the company strenuously denies that it has ever refused service based on Americans’ political or religious beliefs. But free speech lawyers say the company can’t just deny its record of doing exactly that.

On Thursday morning, a newly inaugurated Trump spoke to the World Economic Forum via livestream, taking questions from CEOs of some of the world’s largest companies. During his response to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan’s question about the effect of executive orders on the economy, Trump told Moynihan to stop debanking people who disagree with Democrats.

“I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives, because many conservatives complain that the banks are not allowing them to do business within the bank and that included a place called Bank of America,” Trump said, after talking about his efforts to cut inflation. “They don’t take conservative business. And I don’t know if the regulators mandated that because of Biden or what, but … I hope you’re going to open your banks to conservatives, because what you’re doing is wrong.”

On Friday, Bank of America spokesman Bill Halldin told The Federalist, “We’re not changing our policy, because we never refuse to provide service based on religious or political beliefs.”

In an emailed statement, Halldin reiterated, “We serve more than 70 million clients and we welcome conservatives. We are required to follow extensive government rules and regulations that sometimes result in requirements to exit client relationships. We never close accounts for political reasons and don’t have a political litmus test.”

Alliance Defending Freedom’s 2024 Viewpoint Diversity Score Business Index found that 69 percent of large financial companies’ policies allow them to deny service based on customers’ religious or political beliefs.

Signature Bank, Deutsche Bank, and a Florida bank denied service to Donald Trump in 2021. In her memoir, Melania Trump says her bank accounts were canceled and her son Barron was unable to open an account after the family left the White House. Donald Trump Jr. also says he’s been debanked. In 2021, the payments processor Stripe cut off its business with the Trump campaign.

Bank of America is the United States’ second-largest bank, after J.P. Morgan Chase. It holds more than $2.5 trillion in assets and serves 69 million customers. Halldin also noted, “We serve about 120,000 faith-based organizations around the country and in 2023 matched nearly $6 million to faith-based organizations that received contributions from our employees.” That’s $6 million out of approximately $25 million per year the company matches in employees’ charitable donations.

Lawyers for the nonprofit free speech firm Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) dispute Bank of America’s claims. They say evidence does suggest at least some parts of the enormous company have indeed refused service based on customers’ religious or political beliefs.

Take the case of Indigenous Advance, a Tennessee-based American charity that feeds and teaches impoverished Ugandan children. Bank of America closed its accounts in April 2023 with letters stating, “upon review of your account(s), we have determined you’re operating in a business type we have chosen not to service at Bank of America.”

It took pressure from Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti and more than a dozen other Republican attorneys general, as well as national media coverage, for Bank of America to explain the cancellation months after the fact, said ADF lawyer Michael Ross. Even then, Ross said, the company’s explanations for the cancellation have shifted and conflicted.

Bank of America told The Federalist it canceled the accounts because the bank only serves U.S. businesses and doesn’t bank with organizations that engage in debt collection. Indigenous Advance is a charity, not a business, and Ross said it has never engaged in debt collection.

BoA’s response to state attorneys general cited a website showing Indigenous Advance helping Ugandans find employment at a call center that does debt collection. ADF Vice President of Corporate Engagement Jeremy Tedesco says that is an entirely separate entity from the two American charities whose accounts Bank of America closed.

“Here, Bank of America claims — four months after the account closures and after refusing to provide our clients with any information about the closures despite repeated attempts — that Indigenous Advance Ministries does debt collection,” Tedesco said in an email to The Federalist. “But it does not. A separate, for-profit company provides that service. Therefore, Bank of America’s after-the-fact, debt collection canard — even if it could be believed — cannot explain the bank’s closure of the Indigenous Advance Ministry account, let alone its closure of Servants of Christ’s account, a Memphis church that donates to Indigenous Advance.”

While Indigenous Advance works in Uganda, it is a U.S.-based organization, Ross and Tedesco pointed out. So is the Memphis church Servants of Christ, whose BoA accounts were also canceled after the church donated to Indigenous Advance, Ross noted.

“The ‘country we don’t serve’ excuse is new,” Ross said. “Last year it was, ‘They don’t do business with small companies overseas.’”

“This is just how debanking works,” Ross continued. “They take these vague and subjective policies like ‘reputational risk,’ and then they can cancel the customer based on whatever reason they want, including discriminatory reasons, then hide behind that reason and give conflicting or shifting explanations when media pressure arises.”

Christian podcaster Lance Wallnau also reported last spring that Bank of America froze his account under an accusation of money laundering. He says he had to complete an audit to regain access to his funds.

Testimony to Congress in 2023 said that, without requiring a warrant or any legal process, Bank of America provided the FBI a list of people who made any transactions in Washington, D.C. with a BoA payment card between Jan. 5 and 7, 2021. This flagged tens of thousands of Americans as potential domestic terrorists and opened numerous completely innocent Americans to federal investigation simply because they happened to be somewhat near a small number of individuals rioting at the U.S. Capitol.

During the Biden administration, regulators pushed all big banks to flag as “domestic terrorists” any Americans who shopped at sporting goods or Christian stores. Asked about using artificial intelligence or regulation to flag Americans for speech or gun ownership, a Bank of America spokesman told The Federalist “it’s complicated” and sometimes may involve national security regulations, but that if the bank ever decides to “exit a relationship” it doesn’t do so solely based on AI: “There’s a person involved in that.”

Other massive banks, including J.P. Morgan Chase, have records of canceling accounts and denying payment processing to Christian and conservative organizations. In 2023, Chase canceled the accounts of former Sen. Sam Brownback’s religious charity, the National Committee for Religious Freedom, without explanation. It has also denied payments to or closed accounts for Gen. Michael Flynn Jr., Defense of Liberty, and the Arkansas Family Council. According to RealClearMarkets, Chase told Brownback it would reinstate his charity’s accounts “if NCRF provided the bank with a list of its donors, a list of political candidates NCRF intended to support and the criteria it used to make such determinations.”

Earlier this year, Tennessee passed a law banning big banks from discriminating against customers for their religious or political beliefs. Florida has also passed a similar law. Ross said banks should end vague and unclear “reputational risk” policies that allow them to discriminate against Americans for their speech and beliefs, and make it a policy to always explain exactly why any accounts face closure.

“Bank of America should be scared that customers are trying to hold them accountable and get transparency on this issue,” Ross said, thanking Trump for raising the concern publicly. “I don’t think it’s going to die down until we get some real movement from them.”

https://thefederalist.com/2025/01/27/attorneys-challenge-bank-of-americas-claims-it-doesnt-discriminate-against-conservatives/