Capital One Says It Closed the Trump Organization's Accounts Over Money-Laundering Concerns

Capital One Financial told a federal court on Friday that it closed the Trump Organization's bank accounts five years ago because its anti-money-laundering specialists flagged the company's transaction patterns — the first time a bank has formally connected money-laundering concerns to President Donald Trump's family business.

The disclosure came in a motion to dismiss a lawsuit accusing the bank of "debanking" the Trump family for political reasons. "Documents and Plaintiffs' own allegations make clear that Capital One closed Plaintiffs' accounts for anti-money laundering ('AML') reasons," the filing said. "The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One's AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance."

Capital One has never accused the Trump Organization of illegal money laundering, and Friday's filing stops short of that. What it says is narrower and, for a bank, more routine: that the activity moving through the accounts fell into categories federal regulators tell banks to watch. "The transaction patterns identified by Capital One are among the types of activity flagged by federal banking guidance," the bank argued.

The dispute dates to March 2021, when Capital One gave notice that it intended to close more than 300 Trump-affiliated accounts. Four years later, in March 2025, the Trump Organization and Eric Trump, the president's son, sued in federal court in Florida, arguing that the bank acted out of "woke" ideology and a desire to align itself with the political mood after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Debanking — cutting off financial services over a customer's politics or religion — has become a central grievance on the right, and the case is among the most prominent tests of it.

The Miami federal court has now thrown out two versions of the complaint, each time allowing the plaintiffs to try again. Capital One told the court that the third attempt, filed in July, "suffers from the same fundamental flaws as their prior two pleadings," and that the allegations of political pretext are "misguided" and "based on cherry-picked quotations unsupported by the full context" of the documents already before the judge.

Neither the Trump Organization nor Capital One responded immediately to requests for comment on the filing, which was first reported by Reuters.

The stakes run beyond one bank and one customer. Federal law requires banks to monitor accounts for suspicious activity and to file reports with the Treasury Department, and it generally forbids them from telling customers when they have done so. That legal architecture is why banks almost never explain a closure — and why Capital One putting its reasoning in a public court filing about the sitting president's company is unusual enough to matter on its own.