A number of conservative groups found themselves targets of the Internal Revenue Service during the Obama years, a period that may soon be looked back upon as the good old days for the right.
It’s bad enough that being conservative all but requires one to wear a scarlet “C” on their social media accounts, America’s largest financial institution is allegedly going after right of center account holders.
“JPMorgan Chase is under fire for closing the bank accounts of several customers in the conservative movement,” the New York Post reported.
Conservative activists Enrique Tarrio, Joe Biggs, Laura Loomer and Martina Markota had their Chase accounts closed earlier this year, according to the paper — all within weeks of each other.
And they say it was without satisfactory explanations.
Tarrio, head of the controversial Proud Boys organization and a Trump supporter, told the Post Chase managers could not give him a satisfactory reason why his account was closed, claiming one of the several managers he spoke with called it “mind-boggling.”
David Almasi, vice president of the conservative-leaning National Center for Public Policy Research, suggested these actions should lead other conservatives to reject the financial institution.
“If [JPMorgan chairman and CEO] Jamie Dimon can’t absolutely guarantee that Chase Bank won’t ever discriminate against conservatives, conservatives should consider banking elsewhere,” Almasi said.
The greater fear being whether the recent account closures are part of a larger purge by the bank of accounts linked to right-of-center causes, The Post reported. A purge that has yet to be made public.
Attending last week’s JPMorgan Chase shareholders meeting, Almasi brought a copy of George Orwell’s book, “1984,” giving it to a staffer to present to Dimon.
“I was able to tell him that we have circumstantial evidence that people lost their bank accounts,” Almasi said.
He told the Post that Dimon assured him they are not currently closing accounts for political reasons, but fell short of a flat-out blanket denial.
“Very directly, we have not and do not debank people because of their political views. We have not and do not,” Dimon reportedly said. “We debank people because they are DSA, AML, KYC or unable to meet regulation-regulatory-type requirements for them.”
The acronyms representing laws to prevent fraudulent activities.
As one social media user reminded us, JPMorgan Chase received $25 billion in TARP funds in 2008.
Dimon said afterwards they were asked to by the Treasury Secretary to take money and did not “need” to be bailed out.
“We did not, at that point, need TARP,” he told the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee in 2012. “We were asked to, because we were told, I think correctly so, that if the nine banks there, and some may have needed it, take this TARP, we can get it into all these other banks and stop the system from going down.”
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Tom@bizpacreview.com
The longest-tenured writer at BizPac Review, Tom grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills.
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