When we posted yesterday about Chase Bank’s closures of numerous adult entertainers’ accounts, we didn’t have a clear explanation for why. As a helpful commenter points out, Mary O’Hara at VICE News has a credible theory: that the U.S. Department of Justice told them to.
O’Hara links the closures to Operation Choke Point, a DOJ initiative that’s asking banks to close the accounts of businesses it believes might be breaking the law. A Wall Street Journal op-ed from Frank Keating, president of the American Bankers Association, explains Choke Point’s motives thusly:
Justice’s premise is simple: Fraudsters can’t operate without access to banking services, and so the agency is going after the infrastructure that questionable merchants use rather than the merchants themselves. Most of these merchants are legally licensed businesses on a government list of “risky profiles.” These include payday outfits and other short-term lenders.
Want to get rid of payday lenders — many of whom operate legally — without having to prosecute them? Simply cut them off from the banking system.
It seems extreme that the feds would use the same tactics to go after porn stars, however, and there’s no hard evidence explicitly linking the Chase account shutdowns to Operation Choke Point. O’Hara’s most compelling argument for the DOJ’s involvement lies in a 2011 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation document about industries “associated with high-risk activity,” which lists pornography alongside Ponzi schemes, payday loans, and online gambling — the types of businesses Choke Point is designed to deflate. The FDIC, it should be noted, operates independently from the DOJ or any other executive department.
There’s also porn star Teagan Presley’s claim that Bank of America turned down her application to open a new account after the Chase closure. It’s no smoking gun, but if true, it does seem odd that another bank would independently decide to disallow Presley after Chase shut her out.
UPDATE: A spokesperson told ANIMAL that the DOJ declines to comment on the story.
