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.

The attorneys blamed “biased articles” on Trump’s finances – published in the fall of 2020 and based on “illegally stolen” tax information – for changing the “political winds.”

A Capital One representative testified under oath that “media sources … illuminated additional concerns” that prompted a new look at Project Safeguard’s conclusions, Trump’s lawyers argued.

After the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol uprising, “Capital One shifted from monitoring to mobilizing – taking the politically self-serving path,” the attorneys said.

A Capital One executive, whose name is redacted, “directed his team to determine whether accounts tied to President Trump were receiving ‘stop the steal’ funds,” the attorneys said, using shorthand for a contentious election-fraud narrative.

The lawyers, however, asserted that the Capital One official who operationally led Project Safeguard labeled the reexamination as “logical, but also potentially concerning.”

The attorneys also highlighted an exchange between two Capital One investigators.

“I don’t think I would close solely on AML reasons,” one wrote.

A second investigator agreed and proposed designating certain transactions as “the straw,” the attorneys noted.

“I think [redacted] has the final chapter of the book written and we all agree with it but we still need to write the chapters leading up to that,” an investigator added, according to the lawyers.  

“Yeah exactly,” the other investigator allegedly replied. “We all agree where this is headed but that doesn’t mean we are there.”

Soon after, a presentation identified Capital One by name and logo as one of three companies under media scrutiny for maintaining its relationship with Trump, the attorneys noted.

A Capital One representative testified that the presentation had “nothing to do with” the bank’s decision to close Trump-connected accounts, the attorneys said. But Trump’s team, at the same time, noted a redacted bank employee’s reaction to the presentation: “I think [redacted] is really feeling the pressure on this one.”

Trump’s lawyers called Capital One’s reasoning for closing the accounts “weak.”

“A contractual right to terminate without cause is not a license to terminate for an unlawful reason,” the attorneys wrote, accusing the bank of “[running] two tracks.”

“Internally, it concocted and invoked a specific, documented, risk-based rationale, used it to obtain sign-off from [redacted], and executed a 366-account closure on its authority,” the lawyers said. “Externally, it concealed that rationale from the customers whose accounts it closed, and hid behind a clause that contains no substance.”