NEW YORK (AP) — JPMorgan Chase acknowledged for the first time that it closed the bank accounts of President Donald Trump and several of his businesses in the political and legal aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol, the latest development in a legal saga between the president and the nation’s biggest bank over the issue known as “debanking.”

The acknowledgment came in a court filing submitted this week in Trump’s lawsuit against the bank and its leader, Jamie Dimon. The president sued for $5 billionalleging that his accounts were closed for political reasons, disrupting his business operations.

“In February 2021, JPMorgan informed Plaintiffs that certain accounts maintained with JPMorgan’s CB and PB would be closed,” JPMorgan’s former chief administrative officer Dan Wilkening wrote in the court filing. The “PB” and “CB” stands for JPMorgan’s private bank and commercial bank.

Until now, JPMorgan has never admitted it closed the president’s accounts in writing after Jan. 6. The bank would only speak hypothetically about when the bank closes accounts and its reasons for closing accounts, citing bank privacy laws.

A spokeswoman for the bank declined to comment beyond what the bank said in its legal filings.

Trump originally sued JPMorgan in Florida state court, where Trump’s primary residence is now located. The filings this week are part of an effort by JPMorgan Chase to have the case both moved from state to federal court and to have the jurisdiction of the case moved to New York, which is where the bank accounts were located and where Trump kept much of his business operations until recently.

Trump originally accused the bank of trade libel and violating state and federal unfair and deceptive trade practices.

In the original lawsuit, Trump said he tried to raise the issue personally with Dimon after the bank sent him notices that JPMorgan would close his accounts, and that Dimon assured Trump he would figure out what was happening. The lawsuit alleges Dimon failed to follow up with Trump.

Further, Trump’s lawyers allege that JPMorgan placed the president and his companies on a reputational “blacklist” that both JPMorgan and other banks use to keep clients from opening accounts with them in the future. The blacklist has yet to be defined by the president’s lawyers.

“If and when Plaintiffs explain what they mean by this “blacklist,” JPMorgan will respond accordingly,” the bank’s lawyers said in a filing.

JPMorgan has previously said that while it regrets that Trump felt the need to sue the bank, the lawsuit has no merit.

The issue of debanking is at the center of the case. Debanking occurs when a bank closes the accounts of a customer or refuses to do business with a customer in the form of loans or other services. Once a relatively obscure issue in finance, debanking has become a politically charged issue in recent years, with conservative politicians arguing that banks have discriminated against them and their affiliated interests.

“In a devastating concession that proves President Trump’s entire claim, JPMorgan Chase admitted to unlawfully and intentionally de-banking President Trump, his family, and his businesses, causing overwhelming financial harm,” the president’s lawyers said in a statement. “President Trump is standing up for all those wrongly debanked by JPMorgan Chase and its cohorts, and will see this case to a just and proper conclusion.”

Debanking first became a national issue when conservatives accused the Obama administration of pressuring banks to stop extending services to gun stores and payday lenders under “Operation Choke Point.”

Trump and other conservative figures have alleged that banks cut them off from their accounts under the umbrella term of “reputational risk” after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Since Trump came back into office, the president’s banking regulators have moved to stop any banks from using “reputational risk” as a reason for denying service to customers.

This is not the first lawsuit Trump has filed against a big bank alleging that he was debanked. The Trump Organization sued credit card giant Capital One in March 2025 for similar reasons and allegations. The case is ongoing.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Saturday that he wants a global tariff of 15%, up from 10% he had announced a day earlier after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down many of the far-reaching taxes on imports that he had imposed over the last year.

Trump’s announcement on social media was the latest sign that despite the court’s check on his powers, the Republican president still intends to ratchet up tariffs in an unpredictable way. Tariffs have been his favorite tool for rewriting the rules of global commerce and applying international pressure.

The court’s decision on Friday struck down tariffs that Trump had imposed on nearly every country using an emergency powers law. Trump now said he will use a different, albeit more limited, legal authority.

He’s already signed an executive order enabling him to bypass Congress and impose a 10% tax on imports from around the world, starting on Tuesday, the same day as his State of the Union speech. However, those tariffs are limited to 150 days unless they are extended legislatively.

The White House did not immediately respond to a message inquiring when the president would sign an updated order to peg the tariffs at 15%.

He wrote on social media that he was making the announcement “based on a thorough, detailed, and complete review of the ridiculous, poorly written, and extraordinarily anti-American decision on Tariffs issued yesterday.”

By a 6-3 vote, the justices ruled that it was unconstitutional for Trump to unilaterally set and change tariffs because the power to tax lies with Congress.

In addition to the temporary tariffs that Trump wants to set at 15%, the president said Friday that he was also pursuing tariffs through other sections of federal law which require an investigation by the Commerce Department.

He wrote on Saturday that “during the next short number of months, the Trump Administration will determine and issue the new and legally permissible Tariffs, which will continue our extraordinarily successful process of Making America Great Again.”

After the Supreme Court decision, Trump made an unusually personal attack on the justices who ruled against him in a 6-3 vote, including two of those he appointed during his first term, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. Trump, at a news conference on Friday, said that the situation is “an embarrassment to their families.”

He was still seething Friday night, posting on social media complaining about Gorsuch, Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts, who ruled with the majority and wrote the majority opinion. On Saturday morning, Trump issued another post declaring that his “new hero” was Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote a 63-page dissent. He also praised Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who were in the minority, and said of the three dissenting justices: “There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that they want to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Tariffs have been central to Trump’s economic policies, which he has said address a host of illsfrom reviving trade imbalances and reviving U.S. manufacturing to forcing other nations to action, whether it be stepping up efforts to combat drug trafficking or ceasing hostilities with each other.

He also regularly claimed despite evidence to the contrary that foreign governments would pay the tariffs—not American consumers and businesses.

Federal data shows the Treasury had collected more than $133 billion from the import taxes the president has imposed under the emergency powers law as of December, and Trump has made many promises about what that money might go toward, such as paying down the national debt and sending dividend checks to taxpayers. The Supreme Court decision did not address what happens to the funds that have already been collected from tariffs.

Democrats spoke out quickly on Trump’s new tariff threat. Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee accused Trump of “pickpocketing the American people” with his newly announced higher tariff.

“A little over 24 hours after his tariffs were ruled illegal, he’s doing anything he can to make sure he can still jack up your costs,” they wrote on social media.

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Trump nemesis, added that “he does not care about you.”

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AP reporter Ali Swenson contributed to this story.

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HILL AIR FORCE BASE, Utah (AP) — The Pentagon and the Energy Department for the first time airlifted a small nuclear reactor from California to Utah, demonstrating what they say is the U.S. potential to quickly deploy nuclear power for military and civilian use.

The nearly 700-mile flight last weekend — which transported a 5-megawatt microreactor without nuclear fuel — highlights the Trump administration’s drive to promote nuclear energy to help meet skyrocketing demand for power from artificial intelligence and data centers, as well as for use by the military.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Undersecretary of Defense Michael Duffey, who traveled with the privately built reactor, hailed the Feb. 15 trip on a C-17 military aircraft as a breakthrough for U.S. efforts to fast-track commercial licensing for the microreactors, part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to reshape the country’s energy landscape.

A new emphasis on nuclear energy

President Donald Trump supports nuclear power — a carbon-free source of electricity — as a reliable energy source, even as he has been broadly hostile to renewable energy and prioritizes coal and other fossil fuels to produce electricity.

Skeptics warn that nuclear energy poses risks and say microreactors may not be safe or feasible and have not proved they can meet demand for a reasonable price.

Wright brushed those concerns aside as he touted progress on Trump’s push for a quick escalation of nuclear power. Trump signed a series of executive orders last year that allow Wright to approve some advanced reactor designs and projects, taking authority away from the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has regulated the U.S. nuclear industry for five decades.

“Today is history. A multi-megawatt, next-generation nuclear power plant is loaded in the C-17 behind us,” Wright said before the two-hour flight from March Air Reserve Base in California to Hill Air Force Base in Utah.

The minivan-sized reactor transported by the military is one of at least three that will reach “criticality” — when a nuclear reaction can sustain an ongoing series of reactions — by July 4, as Trump has promised, Wright said.

“That’s speed, that’s innovation, that’s the start of a nuclear renaissance,” he said.

Microreactors would be for civilian and military use

Currently, there are 94 operable nuclear reactors in the U.S. that generate about 19% of the country’s electricity, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s down from 104 reactors in 2013 and includes two new commercial reactors in Georgia that were the nation’s first large reactors built from scratch in a generation.

Recognizing delays inherent to deployment of new, full-scale reactors, the industry and government have focused in recent years on more efficient designs, including a small modular reactor proposed by the nation’s largest public power company, the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Microreactors, designed to be portable, can “accelerate the delivery of resilient power to where it’s needed,” Duffey said. Eventually, the mobile reactors could provide energy security on a military base without the civilian grid, he and other officials said.

The demonstration flight “gets us closer to deploy nuclear power when and where it is needed to give our nation’s warfighters the tools to win in battle,” Duffey said.

The reactor transported to Utah will be able to generate up to 5 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 5,000 homes, said Isaiah Taylor, CEO of Valar Atomics, the California startup that produced the reactor. The company hopes to start selling power on a test basis next year and become fully commercial in 2028.

Some safety concerns haven’t been addressed, experts say

Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the transport flight — which included a throng of reporters, photographers and TV news crews — was little more than “a dog-and-pony show” that merely demonstrated the Pentagon’s ability to ship a piece of heavy equipment.

The flight “doesn’t answer any questions about whether the project is feasible, economic, workable or safe — for the military and the public,” Lyman said in an interview.

The Trump administration “hasn’t made the safety case” for how microreactors, once loaded with nuclear fuel, can be transported securely to data centers or military bases, Lyman said.

Officials also have not resolved how nuclear waste will be disposed of, although Wright said the Energy Department is in talks with Utah and other states to host sites that could reprocess fuel or handle permanent disposal.

The microreactor flown to Utah will be sent to the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab for testing and evaluation, Wright said. Fuel will be provided by the Nevada National Security site, Taylor said.

“The answer to energy is always more,” Wright said. After four years of restrictions on fossil fuels and other polluting energy under the Biden administration, he said, “Now we’re trying to set everything free. And nuclear will be flying soon.”