A new report reveals that there are now at least 13 banking institutions that were recruited by the Biden administration to spy on customers, without warrants, in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
And some of them did the bidding and turned over private customer information to the feds.
It is the Daily Mail that said in addition to the alleged involvement of Bank of America, Chase, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, Citibank, and Truist in the illicit spying, seven others now have been implicated.
They are Charles Schwab, HSBC, MUFG, PayPal, Santander, Standard Chartered and Western Union.
Those all are being investigated by the U.S. House "for colluding with the federal government to spy on Americans" after the protest that turned into a riot, the report said.
It is the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, led by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, that is investigating the alleged collusion.
The report explained the situation was that the Biden bureaucrats conspired with banks to look for indicators of "extremism," "like the purchase of a religious text, like a Bible, or searches including the terms 'MAGA' and 'TRUMP,'" the report confirmed.
The banking corporations apparently all were contacted by the U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) or FBI about spying on Americans' private banking actions – without any charges or warrant involved.
Those institutions now have been contacted by Congress in letters that state, "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.'"
Jordan also told Biden's Treasury pick, Janet Yellen, "This kind of warrantless financial surveillance raises serious concerns about the federal government's respect for Americans' privacy and fundamental civil liberties," the publication reported.
Records uncovered by investigators already show that FinCEN and the FBI got data on hundreds of individuals as a result of work with just one of the banks.
Yellen was warned, in the letter, "Given this coordination, the Committee and Select Subcommittee are concerned that the federal government, through the FBI and FinCEN, sent similar or identical thresholds to other financial institutions that manipulated the SAR filing process to elicit the information and transaction history of individuals without any allegation of federal criminal conduct."
The FBI ended up dispatching agents to investigate some of those identified.
House investigators also have charged the Biden administration "urged" crowdfunding platforms to search their own customers' records, the report said.
via wnd