JPMorgan Chase canceled vaccine skeptic Dr. Joseph Mercola’s business account and the personal accounts of Mercola Market’s CEO, his wife and the company’s CFO, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Mercola Market is a Florida-based health business, and Chase abruptly closed its accounts for unspecified reasons, according to the documents. Chase sent the letters on July 13, notifying the company it had until September 10 to shut down account operations and informing CEO Steven A. Rye and his wife, as well as CFO Amy Legaspi, that they have until August 11 to close their personal accounts and open new ones at another bank.
“After careful consideration, we decided to close your accounts because of unexpected activity on this or another Chase account,” the letters stated. Chase did not give a more specific reason.
“I was told for legal reasons they cannot tell me why they are closing the accounts,” a Chase representative told Rye in a voicemail.
The representative told Rye to send him the letters he received to begin the process of restoring the accounts but repeatedly stressed there was no guarantee that the effort would be fruitful. “We are going to try because you’re a good client of our institution,” he said. (RELATED: Meet The Investors And Activists Fighting To ‘Depoliticize’ America’s ‘Radically Left-Wing’ Corporations)
Chase bank has shut down our business bank accounts along with the accounts of my CEO and CFO, as well as their family members (including spouse and child). They’ve refused to provide any reason for doing so, the oldest account has been active for 18 years.…
— Dr. Joseph Mercola (@mercola) July 25, 2023
“I believe they cancelled all of the accounts because of Dr. Mercola’s (our employer) opinions,” Rye told the DCNF. “He … co-authored the best selling book The Truth About COVID-19 which exposed the likelihood that this virus was engineered in a laboratory funded by the NIH. He correctly predicted the vaccines would not prevent transmission or infection of COVID-19. He has been directly censored by the Biden administration and is being targeted by politically weaponized agencies.”
Mercola was also singled out as one of the top spreaders of COVID-19 falsehoods in a report by the British nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, titled “The Disinformation Dozen.” The report led to him being censored on Twitter for vaccine misinformation, according to a recent batch of Twitter Files posted by journalist Paul D. Thacker.
Legaspi said she did not “have any idea” why Chase closed her personal accounts and was “surprised” that the letters were exactly the same for the business and personal accounts in a statement Rye shared with the DCNF. She also alleged her young adult son’s accounts “are subject for closing.”
David Bahnsen, founder and managing partner of the Bahnsen Group, put forward a shareholder resolution in April urging a review of JPMorgan Chase’s discrimination policies concerning religious and political beliefs. The proposal was in response to media reports that suggested the company has “debanked” customers because they were Christian or conservative, Bahnsen wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
“For privacy reasons, we can’t discuss customer relationships, but we don’t close accounts because of political affiliations, and we didn’t do so in this case,” Chase told the DCNF on Wednesday.
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