The Trump Organization’s lawsuit accusing Capital One Financial Corp. of political discrimination and illegally closing its accounts in 2021 was tossed out by a judge, but he said the claims can be refiled if Trump’s company can fix its “deficient” complaint.
During a hearing Friday, US District Judge Roy Altman in Miami granted Capital One’s request to dismiss the suit filed byPresident Donald Trump’s sprawling real estate company, which had accused the bank of closing hundreds of its business accounts out of animus toward conservatives in a process known as de-banking.
Altman, a Trump appointee, said the complaint was “deficient” for numerous reasons but he nevertheless gave the Trump Organization a chance to file a new one. He said the company had done “just enough” to allege the accounts were potentially closed out of political animus, even though the complaint lacked specifics.
“I’m going to ask you to beef up these general allegations,” Altman said to Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, who has filed a string of lawsuits on the president’s behalf.
Capital One declined to comment on the ruling.
The ruling is a mixed victory for both sides. Capital One won dismissal of the complaint, which Altman criticized from the bench after outlining an array of legal deficiencies. Yet the judge cleared the way for the Trump Organization to request evidence from Capital One that may help the business build a stronger complaint. The judge gave the Trump Organization 90 days to seek evidence from the bank — a costly and intrusive process known as discovery — plus another two weeks to file a new complaint.
Trump’s legal team, in a statement, said the Trump Organization “will follow Judge Altman’s ruling and guidance to engage in fulsome discovery in order to continue to demonstrate that Capital One, along with other major banks, de-banked President Trump, his family, and his businesses for blatantly political reasons.”
Capital One’s lawyer, Helen Cantwell, expressed dismay that the Trump Organization would be able to conduct discovery despite the judge ruling Trump’s company had no valid claims. Still, Cantwell said she didn’t object to the judge’s plan.
The dismissal is at least a temporary setback for Trump’s campaign against de-banking, a practice that he says wrongfully deprives conservative individuals and organizations of financial services. Trump is personally suing JPMorgan Chase & Co. for $5 billion for allegedly engaging in the practice by closing his accounts in the weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters. JPMorgan denies wrongdoing.
Eric Trump, the president’s son and an executive vice president at the Trump Organization, was a plaintiff in the Capital One suit and has been an outspoken critic of de-banking. In March 2025, he said the account closures by Capital One were “a clear attack on free speech” that cost the company millions as it was forced to find a new bank.
The Trump Organization claims the bank ended its decades-old relationship with Trump’s company “simply because Capital One believed that the political views at the time favored doing so.” Capital One moved to dismiss the suit in July, arguing that the claims were “threadbare.”
Gather Evidence
Capital One won an earlier order in July 2025 that put the case on hold pending a ruling on dismissal. That ruling spared the bank from being required to engage right away in the exchange of evidence — a time-consuming and expensive process known as discovery — because the case was seen at the time as likely to be dismissed.
When the suit was filed in March 2025, Eric Trump vowed to sue other banks as well for similar alleged conduct. The president even raised his allegations of de-banking in remarks to Wall Street executives during the last Davos summit.
The complaints against Capital One and JPMorgan assert that the practice began during the administrations of former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, with efforts by the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to prevent financial fraud and abuse.
The “ulterior motive” of those changes, according to the complaints, was to pressure banks to cut off financial services for gun and ammunition dealers, payday lenders and other businesses aligned with conservatives.
The case is Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust v. Capital One, 25-cv-21596, US District Court, Southern District of Florida (Miami).
Photo: Capital One Financial Corp. signage is displayed outside a bank branch in New York. Photographer: Mark Abramson/Bloomberg
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