President Donald Trump has taken his long-threatened legal fight over “debanking” to court, filing a $5 billion lawsuit Thursday in Florida against JPMorgan Chase and CEO Jamie Dimon. The complaint alleges the bank closed Trump family accounts in early 2021 for political reasons — a move the suit calls the product of “unsubstantiated, ‘woke’ beliefs” and an effort to distance the bank from the president’s conservative views. The filing follows public warnings Trump made over the weekend that he would sue JPMorgan for “incorrectly and inappropriately debanking me after the January 6th protest.” In the lawsuit, his attorneys argue the account closures were motivated by political and social considerations rather than legitimate banking concerns. A JPMorgan spokesperson had not responded to Decrypt’s request for comment at the time the story was filed. Debanking — the practice of banks severing relationships with customers seen as risky or controversial — has been a recurring grievance for Trump and many in the crypto industry. The Trump family has long claimed that top U.S. banks shut them out after the January 6, 2021 events and the end of his first term. They say that experience helped spur the family’s interest in crypto as an alternative financial system with fewer gatekeepers. Trump has publicly linked debanking to government pressure. Speaking to Decrypt last June from the Oval Office, he said big banks had been “very nasty” to him because of his politics and blamed regulators aligned with the Biden administration for exerting control over banks’ decisions. After those comments, he issued an executive order in August directing federal banking regulators to adopt policies aimed at preventing political-view-based debanking — an order that explicitly referenced concerns in the digital assets sector as well. Crypto industry leaders have echoed those concerns, alleging that under the Biden administration some firms were left without basic banking access — a campaign they have sometimes described as “Operation Chokepoint 2.0.” The issue of debanking has become a rare point of convergence between crypto advocates and the Trump camp. Since Trump returned to the White House, federal banking regulators have moved to put in place policies meant to alleviate crypto firms’ fears about losing banking services. The new lawsuit, however, focuses blame directly on JPMorgan’s leadership for the Trump family’s alleged exclusion from the banking system — and raises the stakes in an issue that has major implications for the relationship between traditional finance, politics, and the crypto sector. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news