by Charlotte Hazard
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said Tuesday that the federal government has been weaponized to spy on Americans’ bank accounts and financial transactions.
“We know in 2023 [that] 14,000 different individuals in the government [about] three million times in one year……14,000 individuals did over three million searches of this database of information on Americans banking habits,” Jordan said on the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show.
Last week the House Judiciary Committee issued a report that detailed how the federal government had unchecked access to private financial data of everyday Americans. “The FBI has manipulated the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) filing process to treat financial institutions as de facto arms of law enforcement, issuing ‘requests,’ without legal process, that amount to demands for information related to certain persons or activities it considers ‘suspicious,'” the report reads.
Jordan explained that the way the law is supposed to work is that if banks see something suspicious, they are supposed to report it to the Treasury Department. “But what’s happening in practice is the FBI and other agencies are going to the banks saying, ‘Hey, you might want to do a report on this, or on this person, or on this business’ and then it comes into the government, goes in this database and then everybody’s searching it [and] spying on what you’re doing in your bank account.”
Last year, the House GOP launched an investigation into Bank of America following a whistleblower testimony claiming the firm voluntarily shared the private financial data of its customers with the FBI without any legal process.
Just the News first reported in February of 2023 that FBI whistleblowers had raised concerns about the acquisition of bank records without subpoenas. “That is not how our system is supposed to work,” Jordan said.
In April of this year, 15 state financial office holders from 13 different states sent a letter to the CEO of Bank of America, telling him to stop “de-banking” conservative customers.
In the letter that was sent, the financial officers allege that Bank of America’s actions harmed the civil liberties of Americans.
Examples cited in the letter include the bank allegedly discriminating against Christian groups’ accounts and joining a net-zero climate alliance.
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Charlotte Hazard is a reporter at Just the News.
