A key congressional investigator is demanding a global bank turn over documents revealing its role in a government operation that used the January 6 Capitol riot to spy on millions of Americans.
U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) subpoenaed Citibank for documents and communications related to an FBI spy operation in which Citibank and other financial institutions turned over records on every private financial transaction in the Washington, D.C. area between January 5 and January 7, 2021.
Citibank failed to comply with the Committee's previous voluntary requests, leading Jordan to issue a subpoena.
The FBI's request, issued without a legal warrant, revealed the financial information of millions of Americans who the FBI had no reasonable cause to suspect of a crime.
Financial institutions, such as Citibank and Bank of America, complied with the apparently unconstitutional request.
โAccording to testimony from current and former FBI officials and documents recently obtained by the Committee and Select Subcommittee, Bank of America (BoA) provided the FBIโvoluntarily and without any legal processโwith a list of individuals who made transactions in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area with a BoA credit or debit card between January 5 and January 7, 2021,โ the Judiciary Committee reports.
โAdditionally, the Committee and Select Subcommittee have recently obtained documents that raise new concerns regarding the extent to which financial institutions, including Citibank, may have shared customer information with federal law enforcement despite the lack of an individualized nexus to criminal conduct,โ the Committee notes.
โThese documents indicate that a Citibank representative was included on emails and Zoom discussions organized by the FBI and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) focused on โidentifying the best approach to information sharing, both strategic and operational,' in the wake of the events of January 6.ย These documents suggest that the executive branch was brainstorming informal methodsโoutside of legal processโfor obtaining private customer information from financial institutions,โ the Committee notes.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions ofย American Liberty News.
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2 Comments
NEED a BUNCH more like Jordan!!
I am asking historians: has there ever been a time of more corruption in an administration and its agencies before in the history of America?