The bank “reviewed and cleared” Trump-connected transactions – only to re-examine them and decide to debank the president before gathering evidence, attorneys argued.

President Donald Trump’s lawyers accused Capital One on Friday of deciding to close accounts connected to the president before gathering the evidence to do so.

The Trump team asked a federal court to deny Capital One’s motion to dismiss the March 2025 lawsuit accusing the bank of illegal debanking.

Capital One last month said an internal anti-money laundering team undertook “months of analysis and a careful review” of Trump-connected accounts before closing more than 300 of them in 2021.

Trump’s lawyers last week argued the investigation was not predicated on AML but was “the construction of a pretext,” adding that Capital One “buckl[ed] to political pressure and groupthink mentality.”

The bank “surveilled Plaintiffs” beginning in early 2017 “for no reason other than politics,” Trump’s lawyers argued.

Project Safeguard, as it was called, “produced only confirmation that all transactions and dealings by Plaintiffs and the other Trump-related accounts were completely proper and appropriate,” the president’s lawyers said.

The bank “broadly considered taking remedial action” twice but reconsidered because “the regulatory risk did not rise [to] the level to cause risk or concern,” the lawyers said.

“The transactions that Capital One would later invoke as a false pretext to try and justify a mass debanking – wire payments tied to a 2016 condominium project, a development project abandoned in 2016, and consulting payments back in 2008 – had been reviewed and cleared,” the attorneys asserted Friday.

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