(LifeSiteNews) – Former Trump attorney John Eastman says that top Bank of America and military-family financial services provider USAA have both shut down his accounts without explanation amid the conservative legal scholar’s ongoing woes stemming from his role in challenging the 2020 election results.
Eastman told the Daily Caller that in September 2023 Bank of America notified him it would be terminating his accounts, which he had mostly phased out of using due to the company’s left-wing policies. However, USAA, which prides itself on “help(ing) military families protect what and who they love,” notified him two months later that they were closing his accounts with them as well (Eastman’s family qualified for USAA due to his father-in-law’s service in World War II and the Korean War).
“And so that was where all of our automatic payments were coming out of, all our automatic deposits,” he said. “So it was a real pain to shift everything. We had to get a new bank account opened and shift everything over.” Neither company offered a rationale for its decision, either to Eastman or to the Caller.
Eastman’s professional life and public reputation have taken a series of hits ever since the bitterly disputed 2020 election between former President Donald Trump and Democrat successor Joe Biden, during which Eastman advised that former Vice President Mike Pence had the constitutional authority to block the certification of electoral votes. Pence infamously disagreed, and Democrats incorporated Trump and Eastman’s position into their persistent efforts to accuse Trump of “insurrection.”
As a result, Eastman was pressured to resign from Chapman University in January 2021. He has been recommended for disbarment in California and is a co-defendant of Trump’s in Fulton County, Georgia’s election case, along with continuing to be questioned by Capitol Hill investigators. His defenders cast him as an unjustified victim of weaponized government; even experts who disagree with his legal opinion about vice presidential authority such as George Washington University’s Jonathan Turley have decried efforts to punish him as criminalization of differing views.
While the financial institutions’ actions do not appear to legally violate the terms to which their customers agree, they represent a troubling willingness to deny services to individuals in their private lives on the basis of political views and associations, and in USAA’s case, a striking departure from the nonpartisan patriotic image cultivated by its advertising.
“What these banks are doing is they’re saying you’re either high risk, or we don’t want to do business with you, or whatever it is,” the Foundation for Government Accountability’s Eric Bledsoe told the Caller. “There’s no methodology behind this. There’s no kind of reason that matches traditional indicators or traditional metrics that a bank would use to calculate your liquidity, your credit score, whatever it is. They’re using these non-financial factors, and then making these decisions and just like closing people’s accounts.”
“I’m gravely concerned,” he added. “It really is the kind of next step in (Environmental, Social & Governance). So ESG across the board, it really is about like, redirecting capital away from the politically disfavored and to the politically favored at the moment, without going through the political process at all.”
Over the past several years, there have been numerous instances of banks, credit card companies, and crowdfunding platforms cutting off services to conservative individuals and group, thanks in large part to the influence of left-wing groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and corporate trends such as ESG scoring. The Biden administration’s interest in centralized digital currency has further intensified fears of a future in which Americans’ basic economic freedoms are tied to conformity with the views of those in power.