Donald Trump hits JP Morgan and Jamie Dimon with $5bn lawsuit
President Donald Trump has JP Morgan and its top boss, Jamie Dimon, in a $5bn (£3.7bn) lawsuit following claims the banking giant debanked him for political reasons.
Earlier this month, Trump blasted America’s biggest bank for “incorrect and inappropriately” discriminating against him after the President alleged JP Morgan stopped offering him services after the Capitol riots on 6 January.
Trump’s personal lawyer, Alejandro Brito, who was also involved in Trump’s action against the BBC, filed the lawsuit in the Florida state court in Miami-Dade County.
The lawsuit alleges that Trump and his businesses suffered “considerable financial and reputational harm” after the bank closed their accounts in 2021.
A spokesperson for JP Morgan said, “While we regret President Trump has sued us, we believe the suit has no merit.”
“We respect the president’s right to sue us and our right to defend ourselves – that’s what courts are for.”
They added that the bank “does not close accounts for political or religious reasons” but does “close accounts because they create legal or regulatory risk for the company.”
The UK has seen its own debanking scandal in recent years, which led to the resignation of NatWest boss Dame Alison Rose after Coutts – a private bank within the NatWest group – identified the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, as a politically exposed person (PEP).
The new flare-up between Trump and Dimon follows a series of brewing disputes between the President and the world’s most influential banker.
Dimon came to the defence of Federal Reserve Jerome Powell, warning that anything that “chips away” at the Fed’s independence was “not a good idea” and risked driving up inflation and interest rates.
Trump had accused Dimon of wanting to have higher interest rates to “make more money.”
Dimon: Trump policies are not binary
In an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Dimon avoided overtly criticising the President, branding many of Trump’s divisive policies as “not binary”.
When pressed on Trump’s latest tariff salvo on European nations, where he threatened 10 per cent levies from 1 February due to the defence of Greenland’s sovereignty, Dimon endorsed the use of “economic persuasion to push Europe to be stronger.”
“We should do what we have to do to create national security… some of that may require policy that is not typical, like tariffs,” he said.
But Dimon did also make clear he was “not a tariff guy in general”.
One Trump policy Dimon has strongly opposed is the President’s idea of a 10 per cent credit card cap, which the banker said would remove credit from the majority of Americans and hurt all businesses.
“It would be an economic disaster, and I’m not making that up because our business… we would survive it by the way,” he said in Davos.
“The people crying the most won’t be the credit card companies, it will be the restaurants, the retailers, the travel companies, the schools, the municipalities because people will miss their water payments.”