Large Banks Misallocated Compliance Attention by Scrutinizing Lawful Conservatives While Neglecting Cartel-Linked Money Laundering
Source: Helen Raleigh. "Bank Of America Goes Harder On Conservatives Than Cartels." October 20, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author argues that big banks like Bank of America let billions in suspicious, cartel-linked money slip through unreported while going after lawful conservative and religious customers. She says this shows banks are worrying about political optics instead of real threats, which makes the financial system and national security less safe for everyone.
Conclusion
Large U.S. banks like Bank of America and TD Bank misallocated compliance resources by prioritizing viewpoint-based reputational concerns over genuine money-laundering threats, leaving the financial system and national security more vulnerable.
Premises
- Treasury fined Bank of America over $1.2 billion for willfully neglecting Bank Secrecy Act requirements from 2018 to 2025, including failing to timely report over $5 billion in suspicious transactions, more than $1 billion of which carried elevated national-security risk.
- Chinese money-laundering networks are a principal channel for laundering Mexican cartel proceeds, including fentanyl revenue, so delayed reporting gives traffickers a reliable high-volume channel and weakens the government's sanctions and asset-freeze tools.
- TD Bank paid over $3 billion in penalties in 2024 for similar Bank Secrecy Act failures, showing the problem is not isolated to Bank of America.
- An OCC review found that Bank of America, TD Bank, and seven other major banks restricted or terminated relationships with conservative organizations, religious groups, and lawful businesses based on political or religious views.
- Specific examples, including TD's objection to a nonprofit's pandemic loan after an SPLC 'hate group' label, Bank of America's political 'whipsaw' on private-prison clients, and its sharing of customer card data with the FBI after Jan. 6 without legal process, illustrate politicized scrutiny of lawful customers.
- The same institutions that failed to flag cartel-linked laundering for years actively scrutinized politically disfavored but lawful customers.
Assumptions
- The banks' viewpoint-based de-banking and their AML failures reflect a trade-off in compliance resources rather than unrelated, independent problems.
- The OCC's findings about political and religious debanking are accurate and indicate genuine viewpoint discrimination rather than legitimate risk management.
- Resources spent scrutinizing lawful conservative customers could and would have been used to detect money laundering.
- Regulators' characterization of the failures as revenue-driven is compatible with the claim that they were driven by political attention.
- Reputational-risk decisions regarding conservative customers were motivated by political viewpoint rather than business or legal risk.
- Examples cited are representative of systemic behavior across large banks.