The banks wanted the right to say no. They have it. The bill has arrived.
Jeanine Pirro subpoenaed JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo for following banking regulations. The U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., sent the demands on her own authority — no banking regulator had referred the matter — ordering the country’s largest lenders to produce lists of customers whose accounts were closed and the reasons for each. The statute her office is exploring, the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act, was enacted in 1989 to clean up the savings and loan crisis, then repurposed after 2008 to prosecute the mortgage fraud that cratered the economy. Pirro is repurposing it again, this time to investigate why banks exercised the discretion the same government gave them.
The industries the investigation is meant to protect — oil and gas, coal, firearms manufacturing — are the ones the administration has publicly named as victims of political discrimination. The president himself sued JPMorgan in January, claiming the bank closed his accounts after January 6. He sued Capital One last year over more than 300 Trump-affiliated accounts. Two of Pirro’s prosecutors visited the Federal Reserve’s construction site in April, a tour widely viewed as intimidation in a separate investigation. The pattern is not subtle. This is the shape of prosecutorial power wielded on behalf of clients — not the legal definition, the literal one. The pipeline’s prosecutor sends the subpoena, and the bank that followed regulations now has to explain itself to a prosecutor acting on the administration’s behalf.
Banks say they don’t close accounts for political or religious reasons. They say their decisions track anti-money-laundering regulations — the same regulations federal examiners audit them on. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency found what it called “early evidence” of account closures affecting the named industries in a December preliminary report. Early evidence is not a finding. It is a pretext for a subpoena, and the subpoenas arrived without the OCC ever referring the matter to the Justice Department. FIRREA requires no showing of discriminatory intent. It is broad enough to investigate almost anything a bank has done. That is not a safeguard. That is a leash.
Now name the class. This is what every industry that successfully captures its own regulator discovers sooner or later: the apparatus you built to protect yourself from public accountability can be picked up and aimed back at you by anyone who wins the next election. Since at least the mid-1990s, the financial industry has worked to expand its legal authority to refuse service to anyone it considers too risky, too controversial, or simply too expensive to serve. The anti-money-laundering framework that banks now cite when they close accounts they deem too risky was built out across four administrations of both parties — Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump — each layer added with the banks’ own lobbyists in the room. The “know your customer” requirements, the suspicious-activity-reporting regime, the OFAC sanctions lists — every layer gave those same banks more discretion to decide who was too dangerous to serve. The banks never objected to the discretion. They objected to the paperwork. They built themselves a fortress of unreviewable business judgments and assumed they’d always hold the keys.
I have watched this movie since Nixon. The mechanism is the same: the government’s investigative power, aimed not at crime but at the administration’s enemies, in service of the administration’s friends. Nixon kept a list and sent the IRS to audit it. The targets change. The subpoena does not. Now the list is banks that closed accounts — and the instrument is a grand-jury subpoena instead of a tax audit. When Operation Choke Point, an Obama-era Justice Department initiative, pressured banks to cut off payday lenders and firearms dealers, the industry objected on process grounds — not because it objected to cutting off customers, but because it objected to being told which ones. When the OCC under the first Trump administration rolled back those pressures, the industry celebrated the restoration of its own independent discretion. The discretion was always the point.
The underlying mechanism is not complicated. When a regulated industry builds a compliance regime around unreviewable business judgments, it is building a weapon. It assumes it will always hold the handle and the targets will always be its own chosen targets — criminals, terrorists, politically disfavored industries. The moment someone else picks up the weapon, the industry discovers that the handle was never welded to its own hand. The banks are now learning what every worker whose factory closed, every patient whose rural hospital was stripped for parts by a private-equity fund, and every small business whose line of credit vanished the week the new owners took over has already learned: the discretion you demanded when you held the pen is the same discretion that will be used against you when someone else picks it up.
Every industry that fights for unreviewable power over its customers eventually discovers that power can be turned in a direction it didn’t anticipate. The weapons manufacturers who insisted on the right to sell to anyone discovered that right could arm people who shot up schools, and the public noticed. The tech platforms that insisted they were neutral utilities discovered that neutrality meant hosting material their advertisers despised, and the advertisers left. The banks built themselves a fortress and are now shocked — shocked — to find that the fortress has a door and someone else is walking through it with a subpoena.
The same Treasury Department is simultaneously ordering banks to flag customers by immigration status. Banks must serve the administration’s preferred industries and screen the administration’s preferred targets, and the prosecutor will visit if they get it wrong.
The administration that accuses its opponents of “lawfare” has sent prosecutorial subpoenas to the country’s largest banks — not for any crime a regulator identified, but for closing accounts the banks say they closed because the government told them to manage risk. The principle the banking industry has advanced in regulatory comments, white papers, and congressional testimony for three decades is that banks must retain broad discretion over whom they serve because only bank management can assess the full range of legal, reputational, and operational risks. Fine. Apply that principle to the customer whose account was closed because the bank decided, after January 6, that associating with a former president was a reputational risk. The discretion is the same. The legal authority is the same. The only thing that changed is whose name was on the termination letter.
The banks wanted the right to say no. They have it. When the subpoena serves the donor, the law serves no one.