Bank of America CEO Responds to Trump’s Claim He Was Rejected as a Customer

SORKIN: “Good morning to you. This is a really good afternoon. Joining me right here in Aspen is Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moynihan. And I originally planned to talk to you about the economy, and I still do, but I have something that was not on my bingo card this morning, because we talked to President Trump on ‘Squawk Box’ about this executive order that he’s planning around banks, who he thinks discriminated against conservatives, and your name came up, and so I just wanted to show you what he said, and wanted to get your reaction to that.”
[Clip starts]
Trump: “What happens is, I call up Bank of America routinely, because when I was president — this was after I got out by the way — I call up Bank of America routinely, and I speak to him, and I speak to a couple of people, and they have zero interest. Brian was kissing my a** when I was president, and when I called him after I was president to deposit a billion dollars plus, and a lot of other things, more importantly to open accounts, and he said, we can’t do it. No, we can’t do it.”
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SORKIN: “You heard it. Were you watching TV when this was happening?”
MOYNIHAN: “So I got up early, because we’re on East Coast time. I was working out, and I was watching your wonderful show, and he came on, and I’m telling you, I’m still trying to unsee some of the visuals that he created with his commentary. But look, the president’s after the right thing, which is the laws, rules, and regulations around our industry became used to cause things to happen. It’s what’s BSA/AML, whether it’s KYC, whether it’s reputational risk, and you heard Tim Scott quote about it. It is right to go look at these rules, because at the end of the day, they are causing decisions to be made that can be looked at in retrospect and made differently. We should get these rules right, so our company, my colleague companies, the industry has been working with the Treasury administration today, and this administration, trying to figure out how to get these rules balanced, so that we’re not subject to this swinging back and forth, and it’s after-the-fact look. So the president’s on the right issue, he asked me about it in Davos, we were there —“
SORKIN: “Right.”
MOYNIHAN: “— he asked me, he talked about this morning, and I welcome getting this fixed. At the end of day, we bank 70 million consumers, more small business than anybody else, 12 million small business, more middle-market companies. We bank everybody. But the reality is, we want to make sure that the rules and regulations don’t cause decisions to be made, that then are looked at in the aftermath and dealt differently.”