The Wyoming senator accuses major US banks of politically motivated account closures targeting the Trump family and crypto firms
Senator Cynthia Lummis is escalating her war against what she sees as the banking industry’s worst habit: picking and choosing customers based on politics. The Wyoming Republican is calling for a criminal investigation into major US banks that she says systematically debanked President Donald Trump, his family members, and digital asset companies for purely political reasons.
The debanking dossier
On January 31, 2026, she laid out the scope of what she considers a coordinated campaign against the Trump orbit.
“Donald Trump, the president, was debanked… Eric Trump was debanked… Donald Trump Jr. was debanked… Melania was debanked… Digital asset firms all over the country were debanked.”
The senator frames these individual incidents as part of a broader pattern she and other Republicans have labeled “Operation Choke Point 2.0.” The original Operation Choke Point was an Obama-era initiative that pressured banks to cut ties with legal but politically disfavored industries like payday lenders and firearms dealers. The sequel, critics argue, targeted crypto companies and political opponents of the Biden administration with the same playbook.
The House Financial Services Committee published a report on November 30, 2025, alleging that the Biden administration facilitated the debanking of digital asset businesses through regulatory pressure on banks. In English: regulators didn’t explicitly order banks to drop crypto clients, but they allegedly made it clear that keeping those clients would invite unwanted scrutiny.
In November 2025, JPMorgan Chase closed accounts belonging to Jack Mallers, the CEO of Strike, a Bitcoin payments company. Lummis responded by declaring that “Operation Choke Point 2.0 regrettably lives on.”
Federal machinery starts turning
By June 2026, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro had issued subpoenas to major banks including JPMorgan and Bank of America as part of an investigation into alleged targeted debanking practices.
President Trump has filed lawsuits against JPMorgan and Capital One, alleging that the banks closed accounts associated with him and his family for political reasons. The account closures reportedly occurred after January 6, 2021.
Trump signed the “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans” Executive Order on August 7, 2025. The order mandates that regulators address politicized debanking, with review timelines that were set for December 2025.
Lummis, who chairs the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Digital Assets, has positioned herself at the intersection of these efforts. She has drawn explicit connections between the debanking of political figures and the broader challenges facing the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Legislative response takes shape
Beyond investigations and lawsuits, Lummis is pushing for structural changes. She has proposed the CLARITY Act, legislation aimed at providing regulatory certainty for digital asset firms and preventing the kind of ambiguous regulatory pressure that allegedly enabled debanking in the first place.
What this means for crypto investors
Investors should watch two things closely: the progress of the CLARITY Act through committee and the results of Pirro’s investigation into the banks. If those investigations reveal documented evidence of coordinated, politically motivated account closures, the resulting fallout could reshape the banking industry’s relationship with both crypto and with politically exposed persons more broadly.
