Federal Regulator: JPMorgan’s WePay Screened for ‘MAGA’ and ‘America First’ Before Closing Accounts

The federal regulator that supervises America’s biggest national banks says it now has the paper trail. In a 47-page report released October 14, 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency found that all nine of the largest national banks it oversees maintained policies between 2020 and September 2025 that “may have required, encouraged, or otherwise influenced” the denial or limitation of financial services based on customers’ political or religious beliefs or their lawful business activities. The same day, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced it would investigate.

The nine banks are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC, TD Bank and BMO. Comptroller Jonathan Gould said the findings are “irrefutable evidence that the nation’s largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses.”

What the regulator reviewed

The OCC announced the review in September 2025 and published preliminary findings that December. For the final report, titled “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans,” the agency says it reviewed nearly 100,000 complaints made to the institutions it regulates and received about 50,000 documents from the banks, totaling roughly 420,000 pages.

Its central conclusion is that the banks’ “reputation risk” policies were the engine of the problem. Those policies, the report says, “lacked clear standards and objective, risk-based criteria” and “disadvantaged certain Americans based on their political, religious or social views or based on their lawful business activities.” To make their calls, the banks relied in part on negative news searches and on what the report calls “the opinions of advocacy organizations.”

Beyond individual customers, the banks kept public and nonpublic restrictions on entire lawful industries, including oil and gas exploration, coal, firearms and ammunition, detention facilities, tobacco and e-cigarettes, and digital assets.

“MAGA and Trump-related items are part of it”

The most striking material involves WePay, a payment processor owned by JPMorgan. Until April 2022, WePay’s terms of service barred merchants whose business involved “hate, violence, racial intolerance.” To police that rule, WePay ran an internal system that screened a list of terms against merchants’ profiles, websites and transactions. According to the OCC, some of those terms were added after January 6, 2021, and an exemplar list included “MAGA,” “Make America Great” and “America First.”

The report then lays out what happened to the merchants caught by it:

• In February 2021, WePay closed the account of a merchant selling pro-Trump and MAGA merchandise after determining the goods “promote[d] hate, violence, or racial intolerance.” An employee later explained, “we closed their account due to violating our WePay’s Terms of Services (MAGA and Trump-related items are part of it).”
• In September 2021, WePay closed the account of a merchant selling “conservative/republican t-shirts, hats, etc.” after escalating it to JPMorgan reputation-risk staff.
• In June 2021, WePay closed the account of a group that bank staff described as a “[r]ight wing religious conservative non profit,” citing the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate group” label. In 2023, a bank employee went back and scrubbed the words “right wing” and “religious” from the internal record.

JPMorgan itself, the report says, turned away a conservative-leaning retailer on multiple occasions between 2021 and 2023. Afterward, at a senior employee’s direction, staff edited the internal entries to make them read more neutrally, deleting phrases such as “right-wing” and a note that as “more far-right competitor [companies] step in to take this company’s extreme clients, it may become more mainstream and more appropriate for JPM to bank.”

PNC, Wells Fargo and the SPLC

In late 2021, PNC declined a line of credit to a media company that its own relationship manager described as financially growing and performing, with no credit risk flagged. Bank employees pointed instead to a speech by one owner, a conservative commentator, and noted that another owner’s foundation “has funded several Christian conservative groups, including several identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.” One employee wrote that it was “really difficult to justify aligning ourselves with a company whose owners have built very public personas around opinions very contrary to PNC’s beliefs/values.”

Wells Fargo’s case is about pressure. After a card network flagged a list of merchants, the bank asked an independent sales organization to review a religious nonprofit it serviced. The organization looked and concluded the nonprofit was doing nothing wrong. Wells Fargo then sent it material from a third-party website about the nonprofit’s views on same-sex marriage and asked whether that “change[d] their stance.” The organization terminated the account with immediate effect. When it asked how the bank identified problem clients, Wells Fargo pointed to three resources, including the Southern Poverty Law Center.

That reliance looks worse in hindsight. On April 21, 2026, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, indicted the SPLC on charges including wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. Prosecutors allege the group secretly routed more than $3 million in donor money to people tied to violent extremist groups. Those are allegations, not findings; the SPLC disputes the case and says its payments went to informants whose information helped law enforcement.

The banks’ answer, and the CFPB’s

JPMorgan said its policies prohibit discrimination based on political or religious views and described the findings as a limited number of historical interactions, adding that it has improved the way it does business. Wells Fargo declined to comment to Fox Business. The Bank Policy Institute said the industry supports fair access to banking services.

The OCC acknowledges that many banks revised their policies in 2023 and 2024 and moved faster after President Trump’s executive order on debanking. But it is not satisfied. The report warns that reputation risk is sometimes simply “rebranded as a ‘franchise’ or ‘brand’ risk,” and states plainly that “no bank has fully and publicly acknowledged its past debanking decisions.” Gould said he is “not confident” the banks’ efforts “will be enough,” and the agency is weighing new action to bar discrimination on political or religious grounds.

The CFPB said it will “fully investigate whether the institutions featured in OCC’s report and others have complied with federal consumer financial laws,” reviewing complaints and supervisory and enforcement data. Acting Director Mark Paoletta said, “It is appalling that these banks targeted American consumers for their political, social, or religious beliefs that did not align with the Biden Administration or its leftist allies. Many of those targeted were supporters of President Trump.” He called them “thuggish tactics” that “have no place in America.”

For years, conservatives who lost accounts were told it was a coincidence, a compliance glitch or their own imagination. A federal regulator has now read the banks’ own files and found the keyword lists, the SPLC citations and the edited records.

They told conservatives to take their business elsewhere, and now the government has the receipts in the banks’ own handwriting.

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