Congressional investigators are demanding additional documents and information from financial institutions nationwide amid revelations that a Biden administration operation to spy on millions of bank accounts to identify suspected January 6 rioters was even more widespread than previously reported.
U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to the Chief Executive Officers of Standard Chartered Bank USA, Truist, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, Western Union, Charles Schwab, Bank of America, Citibank, HSBC Bank, JPMorgan Chase, MUFG Bank, PayPal, and Santander Bank requesting “documents and communications related to the Committee’s investigation of financial surveillance of American citizens, including the disclosure of private financial records to federal authorities without legal process.”
“Documents obtained by the Committee and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government show that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) circulated specific materials to these banks, and the Committee believes that these banking institutions possess information necessary for the investigation,” the Judiciary Committee reports.
“The Committee previously sent letters to Bank of America, Chase, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, Citibank, and Truist for its probe into how the FBI worked together with banks to spy on Americans following the events of January 6, 2021, without a warrant,” the Committee reports.
“The Committee also sent a letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding all Bank Secrecy Act filings, including Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), that included the tag created to group all SARs related to the events following January 6, 2021,” the Committee adds.
Excerpts of Jordan’s letter to Charles Schwab, for example, read:
“After receiving documents and information from several entities, the Committee and Select Subcommittee learned that the financial surveillance occurring in the United States is much broader than the FBI simply requesting, without any legal process, a list of customers’ transactions from Bank of America. On March 6, 2024, the Committee and Select Subcommittee released an interim staff report detailing its findings to date on how federal law enforcement is using private banks to pry into the private transactions of American customers. That report highlighted how, following January 6, 2021, federal law enforcement commandeered financial institutions’ databases, sought to treat sweeping classes of otherwise lawful transactions as potentially ‘suspicious,’ and profiled Americans using Merchant Category Codes (MCCs), ‘typologies,’ and ‘indicators’ that treated protected political and religious expression as indicative of domestic violent extremism.
“The Committee and Select Subcommittee remain concerned about how and to what extent federal law enforcement and financial institutions continue to spy on Americans by weaponizing backdoor information sharing and casting sprawling classes of transactions, purchase behavior, and protected political or religious expression as potentially ‘suspicious’ or indicative of ‘extremism.'”
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