Last Friday, PNC Financial Services Group reversed course and reopened the account belonging to the parent company of Donald Trump Junior’s news aggregation app MxM News saying that a “good faith error” resulted in the account being closed “mistakenly.”
Earlier in the week, Donald Trump Junior revealed in a tweet that PNC Bank abruptly closed down the account for ROCDIGITAL, LLC “without any explanation.”
Fox News reported that the bank notified the company of the account closure by mail and sent a cashier’s check for the balance remaining in the account when it was shut down.
Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for former President Donald Trump, told Fox that he found out that the account was closed when he visited the bank, and the teller told him he could not complete the transaction because the account was closed and the balance “zeroed out.”
Budowich told Fox that a representative for PNC Bank later explained that the bank has the right to reevaluate its relationships and can terminate accounts “without cause.”
The news of the closure prompted an online backlash from conservatives who claimed that PNC Bank’s actions were the latest example of how “woke” corporations are targeting conservatives.
After Don Junior posted a link to the Fox News report on Twitter, PNC Bank replied to his tweet by posting a statement explaining that account closures are “never influenced by the political affiliations of our customers.”
According to the statement, the bank looked into the circumstances behind the closing of ROCDIGITAL’s account and found that it had been “mistakenly closed due to a good-faith error.” PNC Bank said the account had been reopened and apologized for the “inconvenience,” the statement read.
Budowich and Donald Trump Junior launched the MxM News app last year to compete with other news aggregation apps like Apple News by providing curated stories that are typically “silenced or suppressed” by the corporate news media and big tech.
