Another day, another private lawsuit by the president of the United States.
This time, President Donald Trump is going after JPMorgan Chase—the world’s largest bank by market capitalization—and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, demanding $5 billion in damages for being “debanked” after Jan. 6, 2021.
“Debanked” sounds scary and illegal and much more fraught than what really happened here, which is that after Trump helmed a violent insurrection, JPMorgan decided that he is a risk and closed his accounts with 60-days notice.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon
But according to Trump, a bank telling him he needs to take his money elsewhere is a harm of the highest order because it was disruptive to his business. The horror.
Per the lawsuit, the real reason JPMorgan closed the accounts was—you guessed it—wokeness.
“Plaintiffs are confident that JPMC's unilateral decision came about as a result of political and social motivations, and JPMC's unsubstantiated, 'woke' beliefs that it needed to distance itself from President Trump and his conservative political views,” the lawsuit reads.
There is, of course, no constitutional right to a bank of your choice. Trump is trying to frame JPMorgan’s risk-mitigation move as political bias—a reframe that only works if you agree to Trump’s fiction that Jan. 6 wasn’t a violent insurrection. But as it turns out, banks do not relish keeping accounts for wannabe strongmen who whip their supporters into a frenzy to try to change election results.
Ridiculous as this lawsuit is, it isn’t even the first one Trump has filed attacking banks for daring to not do business with him. He sued Capital One over the same thing back in March, and his private attorney handling that case, Alejandro Brito, continues to fight the bank’s efforts to dismiss it.
If Brito’s name is familiar, that’s because he’s Trump’s current go-to private lawyer after he gave so many of his previous lawyers plum jobs in his administration.
Brito is responsible for the lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal for reporting on Trump’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein and the lawsuit against The New York Times for defamation—the one where the initial complaint was so long and ridiculous that the judge threw it out and told Brito any new complaint couldn’t exceed 40 pages.
Rioters storm the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
In that lawsuit, Brito bragged about how Trump got other media outlets to agree to pay him multimillion-dollar bribes as “settlements.” Most attorneys would likely understand that boasting about how your client used his professional role to line his own pockets doesn’t exactly justify a lawsuit, but most attorneys are not Brito.
Brito is also helming Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC, which Trump alleges damaged him to the tune of $10 billion when it spliced together two parts of his Jan. 6 speech. He was also the person who squeezed $15 million out of ABC over claims that Trump was impossibly defamed by George Stephanopoulos, who said that Trump was found civilly liable for raping E. Jean Carroll when he was actually found liable for “sexually abusing” her.
Brito is a shakedown artist, not an attorney who’s actually equipped to handle complex defamation and banking regulatory matters.
Indeed, before latching onto Trump, the dude mostly practiced franchise law. But the point of these lawsuits isn’t to win—or even to get to trial. The point is to make companies cower before Trump and pay millions in the hopes that he will turn his roving eye elsewhere.
Now it’s time to see if JPMorgan has enough spine to resist that temptation.
