Federal law enforcement lumped together conservative positions on guns and immigration with violent extremism in guidance given to financial institutions to help them monitor people’s transactions, a congressional investigation found.
The House Judiciary Committee and its Weaponization Subcommittee released a report Wednesday detailing the efforts by federal agencies and large financial institutions to surveil Americans’ private financial transactions in the wake of the January 6 protests.
Soon after the Capitol protests, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) created an intelligence document, “Domestic Violent Extremists Likely Emboldened in Aftermath of Capitol Breach,” and the FBI shared the file with financial institutions to help them profile potential domestic extremists, according to the report. The FBI also sent the intelligence document to other private companies with membership in the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), an FBI and DHS portal that includes more than 650 large private companies.
“This FBI intelligence product, along with other materials shared by federal law enforcement, detail the extent to which federal law enforcement derisively viewed American citizens,” the report states.
“Federal law enforcement used this report and materials like it to commandeer financial institutions’ databases and ask the financial institutions to conduct sweeping searches of individuals not suspected of committing any crimes.”
The intelligence brief suggested that outside “pressures” prompting domestic violent extremists (DVEs) to engage in political violence including “firearm legislation, the easing of immigration restrictions, and new limits on the use of public land.”
These ideological positions were tied to “narratives by DVEs that the 2020 General Election was illegitimate,” the motivation of the January 6 Capitol protests. Additional narratives linked by federal law enforcement to DVEs were “discontent with renewed measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, the ordered dissemination of COVID-19 vaccinations, and the efficacy and/or safety of COVID-19 vaccinations.”
Federal law enforcement considered the belief in a global cabal or in “deep state” actors who control political and economic conditions as a potential driver of DVE activity. The intelligence file deriding suspicions about a “deep state” was shared in an inaccessible, government-run portal open only to a small group of large corporations and intelligence agencies, the House report points out.
One financial institution specifically identified in the report is Bank of America, because two former senior FBI officials testified to the Judiciary Committee and Weaponization Subcommittee that the bank gave the FBI a list of all individuals in the Washington, D.C., region who used a Bank of America credit card between January 5 and January 7, 2021. Steven Jensen, the FBI official overseeing domestic terrorism operations at the time, subsequently had the Bank of America list removed from FBI databases because it lacked allegations of criminal activity.
Emails released in the House report appear to show the FBI soliciting the financial information from Bank of America without considering the legality of the request or selecting for individual suspects. An FBI official began communicating with Bank of America representatives about suspicious activity reports on January 15, 2021. The FBI proceeded to send the bank a broad search inquiry into travel expenses and weapons-related purchases made in the Washington, D.C., area from January 5 to January 7, 2021.
The expansive FBI search appears to have resulted in Bank of America sending the bureau a database of thousands of customers, with their financial information. Bank of America refused to turn the database it sent the FBI over to congressional investigators, the report said.
The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) carried out similar activities to the FBI when it facilitated bank searches of certain transactions with terminology designed to track suspected DVEs following the January 6 protest, the Judiciary Committee and Weaponization Subcommittee report examines.
FinCEN instructed banks on how to use Merchant Category Codes (MCCs), four-digit numbers used by brands to categorize transactions, and political search terms to find “indications of involvement in the riots or political violence.”
The terms “MAGA,” “Trump,” “Patriot,” “America First,” “Biden,” “Pelosi,” and “Kamala” were bunched together with terminology such as “Storm the,” “civil war,” and “Oath keeper,” an attachment sent by FinCEN to banks on January 15, 2021 indicates.
In addition, FinCEN sent financial institutions a PowerPoint presentation by KeyBank suggesting they use MCC codes linked to small firearms, sporting goods, pawn shops, and other recreational activities to possibly detect a potential mass shooter.
KeyBank’s presentation advised bankers to use a glossary of keywords to water down the expansive MCC searches and zero in on specific retail stores and gun shops. Dick’s Sporting Good and Bass Pro Shops were among the retailers singled out in the KeyBank presentation recommended by FinCEN.
Another slide contained a wide ranging list of “red flags” for financial investigators to review spanning everything from legal expenses and life-insurance policies to travel purchases and supposedly excessive spending. A different presentation circulated by FinCEN listed a similar range of activities for investigators to potentially flag.
“As this investigation continues, the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government will continue to conduct oversight of the state of financial surveillance, targeting, and the vulnerabilities of Americans’ data,” the report concludes.
“Secret information-sharing portals and backchannel discussions outside the normal course of legal process pose serious risks to the nation. Larger questions remain regarding how the information shared between federal law enforcement and financial institutions was acted upon, and the ongoing extent of the financial surveillance.”