SerpApi.Org
When a federal bank examiner leans on a bank to close a customer's account and that closure destroys the customer's business, the government has taken private property without paying for it. That is a distinct constitutional claim, separate from the shareholder duty-of-care questions now working through the courts, and on June 10, the Department of Justice handed future plaintiffs the discovery record they have always lacked.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, under Jeanine Pirro, subpoenaed JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, demanding the names of customers whose accounts were closed and the internal justification behind each closure. Pair that with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's own December 2025 preliminary findings from its supervisory review of the nine largest banks, and with the OCC-FDIC joint rule stripping “reputational risk” from bank examinations, effective June 9. Three federal actions, in the same year, converged on one admission examiners spent a decade denying: banks were pressured to close accounts that had nothing to do with credit risk.
I have spent 30 years structuring private credit for companies in distress, and I know the difference between a business that fails on its own arithmetic and one a functioning counterparty is ordered to kill. A bank that walks away from a borrower over legitimate underwriting concerns is managing risk. A bank that walks away because an examiner made clear that keeping the account would draw supervisory heat is the government reaching into a private contract and ending it, using someone else's signature.
The reason nobody has filed this claim is structural, not factual. The takings clause restrains the government, not private banks, and a bank's decision to close an account looks, on its face, exactly like the private conduct the Fifth Amendment doesn't reach. That is the same jurisdictional wall Barron v. Baltimore built in 1833, relocated from a shoreline to a balance sheet. But state action doesn't require the government to hold the pen. Blum v. Yaretsky asks whether private conduct is fairly attributable to the state, and the Supreme Court answered a close cousin of that question two years ago in NRA v. Vullo, holding that a regulator's informal pressure on a private insurer to cut off the NRA's business relationships stated a First Amendment claim. Vullo didn't require a written directive. It required a pattern of pressure a reasonable company could read as a threat. The House Financial Services Committee's November 2025 report on Operation Choke Point 1.0 and 2.0 documents exactly that pattern, twice, under administrations of opposite parties.
Vullo answered the coercion question for speech. Nobody has asked it for the property. If examiner pressure is state action enough to support a First Amendment retaliation claim, there's no principled reason it fails the state-action threshold for a takings claim resting on the same facts. The theories diverge from there. Vullo protects the customer's expression. A takings claim protects the customer's economic interest in the banking relationship itself: the receivables, the payment processing, the payroll continuity that an examiner-driven closure destroys. Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York weighs the economic impact of the government action, its interference with investment-backed expectations, and the character of the action. The OCC's own December 2025 preliminary findings on the nine largest national banks describe policies that made “inappropriate distinctions among customers” and imposed “escalated reviews and approvals” with no individualized risk finding to support them. An account closed under a policy the regulator itself now calls an inappropriate distinction, rather than a documented risk determination, scores badly on all three factors.
Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid already told regulators that a right of temporary access to someone else's property counts as a taking. A supervisory letter that permanently ends a customer's access to the entire banking system is not a smaller intrusion. It's a larger one wearing a compliance memo instead of a hard hat.
THE FRAUD HEARING DEMOCRATS COULDN’T BE BOTHERED TO ATTEND
No court has held any of this. A Tucker Act claim against the United States belongs in the Court of Federal Claims, not a district court, and a plaintiff would need discovery, the kind the DOJ subpoenas are now generating, to prove a given closure was regulator-driven rather than a bank's independent judgment. That causation problem has killed every debanking claim before it reached a takings analysis. It is also precisely the gap the subpoenas exist to close. The FDIC's own 2019 settlement of the original Choke Point lawsuit already conceded that “regulatory threats, undue pressure, coercion, and intimidation designed to restrict access to financial services for lawful businesses have no place” at the agency. What that settlement never produced was a plaintiff with standing and a paper trail. The subpoenas are building both.
A trustee who liquidates a beneficiary's asset without authority owes restitution. A government that orders a private party to liquidate a citizen's business relationship owes compensation. It has avoided that obligation only because no one had assembled the record to demand it. As of June 10, someone finally has.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
