The federal government has been urging financial institutions to flag transactions of the Biden administration’s political opponents, a congressional committee revealed last week.
On Wednesday last week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a letter to Noah Bishoff, a former high-ranking official at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
In the letter, Jordan requested Bishoff’s testimony regarding reports that after January 6, 2021, FinCEN began distributing materials to payment institutions instructing them on how to identify transactions by “Homegrown Violent Extremists/Domestic Terrorists.” The documents contain a list of terms that could be used as “indicators” to track these transactions. Such terms include the words “MAGA,” “Trump,” “Cabela’s,” and “Dick’s Sporting Goods.”
FinCEN authorities also told corporations — such as Stripe, Zelle, and commercial banks — to look for certain Merchant Category Codes (MCCs). Transactions which fell under MCCs such as “3484: Small Arms” and “5091: Sporting and Recreational Goods and Supplies” were to be flagged.
“Despite these transactions having no apparent criminal nexus—and, in fact, relate to Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights— FinCEN seems to have adopted a characterization of these Americans as potential threat actors,” wrote Rep. Jordan.
The federal government also told the payment processors to be on the lookout for certain types of transactions, which include “transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,” as well as “the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.”
At the time, Bishoff was the stakeholder integration and engagement director in FinCEN’s Strategic Operations Division. It would have been under his direction that such surveillance of taxpayers was coordinated.
Currently, Bishoff serves as an Anti-Money Laundering (AML) officer for the financial services company Plaid, where it is his job to flag certain transactions as suspicious.
The Biden administration’s crackdown on its political rivals has persisted since January 6th.
Last year Rep. Jordan sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray after learning that the FBI’s Richmond office produced an internal report titled “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.” The document, which was heavily redacted, included a warning against “anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology” held by “radical-traditionalist Catholic” (RTC) Americans.
The FBI report stated that these Americans, who it believed to be “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” (RMVEs), also probably have conservative opinions on immigration and abortion.
To support its claim, the FBI cited articles from mainstream media, including the Atlantic and Salon, and from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which labels nine Christian organizations as “hate groups” and classifies the concept of “Christian identity” as “hate.”
In February, the committee wrote to Wray asking for further details regarding the memo; they never heard back. After that, in April, the committee subpoenaed Wray, but they never heard back. Only after threatening contempt proceedings in July, did the committee receive a copy of a less redacted memo.
Wray falsely testified before Congress that the memo was only produced by the Richmond office, when it in fact involved several other FBI offices as well.
In 2021 the FBI, on orders from the Justice Department, began investigating parents who opposed COVID-19 mandates as “domestic terrorists.” The order from the DOJ was sparked by a request from the National School Board Association for the department to crack down on dissenting parents.
When questioned, Attorney General Merrick Garland falsely testified before the House Judiciary Committee in October 2021 that the FBI was not monitoring nor looking into parents.
“I can’t imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor can I imagine a circumstance where they would be labeled as domestic terrorism,” he stated at the time.
However, the FBI looked into a number of parents and appended the designation EDUOFFICIALS to any threat against education officials, including school board members, according to internal emails made available by DOJ whistleblowers.
In addition to targeting those with certain ideologies, the federal government has been employing covert measures to crack down on Americans who purchase firearms.
Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the gun rights group Gun Owners of America (GOA) last year was able to obtain documents that revealed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has been collaborating with the FBI to keep an eye out for law-abiding taxpayers who purchase firearms.
Generally speaking, the procedure starts when the ATF asks the FBI to start monitoring a certain taxpayer’s gun transactions. A warrant is not necessarily included in the request. After that, the FBI adds that person to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), where they are secretly monitored. An analysis by The Epoch Times indicates that the ATF seems to specifically target minorities.
The NICS system is only intended to be used to prevent people who are not eligible to buy guns from doing so.
But many times, reasons like a taxpayer’s income status are used to justify these monitoring requests. For instance, a man in Arizona with a stated income of $2,839 dollars was registered in the NICS after he purchased several guns.
One ATF agent stated, “In my experience, someone with this amount of income would not be able to afford 20 firearms.”
Similarly, a man from Texas was investigated just because he had no reported employment status.
One FBI agent targeted taxpayers for “purchasing an abundance of firearms without a license or known financial means to obtain the product.”
A Florida man was placed under daily surveillance for four months in 2020 because, as an FBI agent wrote, “based on my training and experience, I have not seen a legal firearms purchaser purchase approximately 30 firearms in a 120-day window for their personal collection.”
An agent in Wisconsin put a man under surveillance after he was discovered texting about purchasing and selling firearms.
After receiving an anonymous tip that a Hispanic woman in Texas had bought ten firearms in two weeks, the ATF marked her for tracking.
Additional records demonstrate that the federal government coerced certain taxpayers into declaring themselves incompetent, which precluded them from obtaining a firearm. According to the Washington Examiner, the FBI, Secret Service, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement worked together between 2011 and 2019 to compel at least 60 individuals to declare that they were a “danger” to themselves or others, or that they did not possess the “mental capacity” necessary to be in possession of a firearm.
This seems to have been done as part of a plea agreement in at least one case. When a federal prosecutor was unable to establish mental incompetence, a plea agreement was made conditional on the defendant acknowledging his own incapacity to think clearly.
