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Behind closed doors at the swanky Sea Island Resort this past January, a Republican financial official from Kentucky claimed that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called her cell phone early in the morning in early 2023, “absolutely furious,” and threatened to oust her in the next election after she put the bank on a blacklist.
Kentucky Auditor Allison Ball, who was the state treasurer at the time, said she was still in her pajamas, eating breakfast with her husband and two young children, when Dimon rang to personally berate her. “You know, I could take all of my banks out of Kentucky and who are you to tell me what to do, and it’s not my business normally to get involved in state races, but I might need to make an exception for you,” she recounted the banker saying, calling it “pretty intense stuff.”
A JPMorgan spokesperson confirms the call happened, but tells Rolling Stone: “He never said that — it’s entirely false.” The bank says the conversation ended well, adding that Dimon and Ball agreed to continue the discussion, and did so.
Ball’s interview was part of the Consumers’ Research Summit, a confab of right-wingoperatives with ties to conservative money man and Supreme Court power broker Leonard Leo, who are waging the so-called “War on Woke.” Rolling Stone has obtained exclusive audio and documents from the event.
The conversation between Ball and Dimon took place while she was state treasurer, shortly after she published a “Restricted Financial Institution List” in January 2023. The list included JPMorgan and other firms she found to be “boycotting” the coal industry, based on a state law she helped pass demanding divestment from financial firms that take climate change into consideration when investing.
According to JPMorgan, Dimon tried to explain to Ball that the bank shouldn’t be on her list, given the bank is among the largest energy financiers in the world and works with Kentucky’s two largest utility companies, which both use coal.
Ball’s chief of staff, meanwhile, says: “Auditor Ball confirmed this quote from Mr. Dimon is an accurate retelling of the conversation.”
JPMorgan is the general depository bank for the state and has managed some state pension assets for years. At the time of the phone call, Ball sat on the board of trustees for the Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System, which had $94 million invested in JPMorgan alternative investment funds.
Pension trustees found that divesting from JPMorgan and other firms, based on the state’s boycott rules, would prove too complicated and costly — and violate their fiduciary duty to serve the best financial interests of state and local retirees — leading them to block Ball’s efforts. This is perhaps why elsewhere in her remarks, she suggested conservatives should stack pension boards with ideological allies, ideally women of color, rather than seasoned candidates.
Had Dimon carried through on this supposed threat, it might have raised ethical and legal issues. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s pay-to-play rule, broadly speaking, prohibits executives at financial firms that manage funds for state pensions from spending money on candidates with influence over those state pensions’ investments.
There is no evidence that Dimon or JPMorgan specifically spent for or against Ball in her bid for auditor that year. Two experts who spoke with Rolling Stone voiced skepticism about Ball’s claim that Dimon called her and threatened to spend against her, in part because the SEC’s pay-to-play rule is so punitive — and easy to get around.
Corporations are prohibited from giving cash directly to candidate campaigns in Kentucky, but they can donate to political action committees, such as the Bluegrass Committee, which has received $10,000 from JPMorgan since 2020. Ball has received $4,100 from that committee in the same period.
JPMorgan has for several years been a sponsor of the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), and top executives from its government banking division have attended the group’s conferences. A key leader in SFOF, Ball has served as both its chair and vice chair. Her former deputy treasurer and chief of staff, O.J. Oleka, is now the group’s CEO.
Ball shared her anecdote about Dimon at the urging of SFOF’s former CEO, Derek Kreifels, who asked with a rhetorical wink: “Have you ever heard from one of the CEOs of the big banks in all of your pushback? And could you, if you have by chance, could you tell us [who]?” Knowing laughter ensued from both the audience and Ball, who replied that she had “told this story a few times, always in closed settings,” adding that “several people in this room” had heard it already.
SFOF plays an integral role in the Leo network of right-wing organizations fighting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across the country. The group organizes Republican state treasurers much in the same way that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) organizes Republican state legislators to pass and enforce laws. The organizations work hand in hand, mutually reinforcing their shared objectives — so much so that ALEC’s CEO, Lisa Nelson, and its president, Jonathan Williams, sit on SFOF’s board of directors and national advisory committee, respectively.
Nelson, who also spoke at the Consumers’ Research Summit, defended Jamie Dimon in a separate conversation about which woke finance executives conservatives need to “scalp,” saying that she doesn’t believe the banker is “all-in” ideologically on ESG and DEI. (JPMorgan confirmed to Rolling Stone that it sponsors ALEC.)
“Two years ago, when I was State Treasurer, I was responsible for building a list of companies that were boycotting oil, gas, and coal. I put JPMorgan on the list because they were categorizing the mining of coal — a signature industry in my state — the same way they were categorizing human trafficking and child labor,” Ball says in an emailed statement. “I am proud of my work to protect the coal industry. I am also proud of my work to broaden the base of conservatives to include young people and minorities who are tired of not having a place at the table.”
Will Hild, executive director for Consumers’ Research, tells Rolling Stone that “Auditor Ball is a hero for putting up with haranguing from Jamie Dimon,” claiming he “debanked” President Donald Trump.” Hild adds: “We are proud of her work standing up for her citizens and the country from politicization of banking from Dimon and others.”
“Now listen to me, Jamie”
A godlike figure to many in finance, Dimon has led JPMorgan since 2006, through the 2008 mortgage meltdown and the Covid-19 pandemic, to sitting atop the Forbes 2000 for the third year in a row. The bank is the largest in America, with $4.6 trillion in assets. Under Democratic administrations, Dimon has often been viewed as a possible candidate for Treasury Secretary.
Some public officials might find Dimon intimidating, but not Ball. In her telling, she put the banker in his place: “He is hopping mad and not letting me get a word in edgewise. He’s pretty upset, and I remember saying, ‘Jamie, Jamie, now listen to me, Jamie, there’s a way forward on this.’”
“And he was saying, you know, ‘We don’t boycott the fossil fuel industry,’” Ball continued. “And I said, ‘Yes, but that’s all oil and gas you’re talking about. It’s not coal.’ And their website is really clear that they were unequivocally boycotting the coal industry. And I had [enough] conversations with coal people that I knew it to be true.”
Ball said that she laid everything out for Dimon and that he finally succumbed to her reasoning: “He was like, ‘OK, all right.’ And he had calmed down at this point in time. He was like, ‘Alright, alright. Well, we’ll talk about this. We’ll talk about this.’ She said she replied to the banker, “Alright. Well you know, happy to make a way forward on this.”
Ball was running for auditor at the time of her interaction with Dimon, and was elected to that office in November 2023.
“Get women of color”
Though Ball bragged to the room of conservative operatives that she bested Dimon, it doesn’t appear that she actually won much of anything. JPMorgan did eventually exit a major carbon emissions pact, a key demand of officials in other states like Texas. But in remarks to the World Economic Forum in Davos, just days before the Consumers’ Research Summit, Dimon doubled down on both ESG and DEI, challenging activists to bring on the attacks.
Additionally, Ball faced the rebuke from officials in her home state. In February 2023, the trustees of the Kentucky County Employees Retirement System sent her a letter saying that they would not be divesting from any of the banks on her boycott list, and that to do so would be “inconsistent with its fiduciary responsibilities.”
That loss may have informed her strategy going forward. Elsewhere in Ball’s fireside chat, she and Hild, from Consumers’ Research, discussed the importance of nominating staunch allies to state pension boards, and agreed conservatives should be installing politically aligned appointees who are young and “hungry,” ratherthan “seasoned old people,” as Ball put it.
Ball and Hild’s comments fully contradict the network’s public critique of DEI: that meritocracy should be paramount in hiring decisions. These operatives consider race, too — when it’s politically advantageous.
“Strategically, this is something that I have done and I’ll just throw this out there,” Ball said. “There are people who are conservative and intelligent, who align with our values and what we believe, who don’t look like everybody in this room.”
Ball continued, “I think it’s a tremendous strategic move if you get women of color, you get people like that. There are some who are conservative, who you can stick on there and it totally takes the wind out of the sail of the DEI group.”
