Capital One filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the Trump Organization over the closure of approximately 385 accounts tied to Trump-affiliated businesses, real estate ventures, and related entities. The bank contended that the account terminations, which occurred in mid-2021, resulted from a months-long anti-money-laundering compliance review conducted by the bank’s financial-crimes team rather than from any political motivations.
The Trump Organization’s amended complaint, filed earlier in July, alleged that Capital One severed ties with the business entities in the aftermath of January 6 Capitol riot events and subsequently invented anti-money-laundering justifications to mask what the Trump companies characterized as politically driven debanking. Capital One denied these allegations, arguing that its cited reasons were grounded in legitimate financial-crime concerns and that the Trump Organization’s arguments relied on selective quotations taken out of context from the bank’s records.
Capital One emphasized that it maintained the confidentiality of its reasoning at the time and provided the Trump companies with an extended timeline to relocate their accounts to other financial institutions. The bank further noted that under the contractual language governing the accounts, it retained the right to terminate any account without providing advance notice or explanation. A federal judge had previously dismissed an earlier version of the lawsuit in March on comparable grounds, determining that a bank’s stated rationale for account closure generally cannot be challenged in court when an open-ended termination clause exists.
The Trump companies added a fraud claim in their July filing, asserting that Capital One engaged in deception by remaining silent about its reasoning. Capital One responded that it had no obligation to provide explanations and that federal banking-secrecy law would have prohibited disclosure of internal anti-money-laundering findings regardless. The bank requested permanent dismissal of the new complaint without an opportunity for the plaintiffs to revise their filings further.
The dispute represents one of several lawsuits initiated by Trump-aligned entities against major financial institutions since Trump returned to office. A separate case with comparable allegations was filed against JPMorgan Chase in January regarding accounts closed during the same period.
Article Attribution | Read More at Article Source
Article summary produced by Claude AI