Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has proceeded with filing a number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the Treasury Department, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The goal is to receive relevant information regarding the Biden administration’s alleged weaponization of government and censorship.
This is yet another attempt to shed light on how third-party groups and organizations were used to circumvent a number of constitutional prohibitions.
ADF’s focus this time is on the previous administration’s policy of using the issue of domestic extremism to, in fact, negatively affect its political opponents – in the cases brought up in these FOIA requests, via access to financial records of US conservatives.
An iteration of the Big Government-Big Tech collusion, which has been investigated by Congress, this one is about Big Governments and Big Banks suspected of having worked together to achieve political goals. But not always by collaborating directly – and this is one of the aspects ADF wants to understand better.
Namely – the involvement of private organizations and businesses hired (“outsourced”) in one way or another, to help banks identify what were designated to be purveyors of misinformation, and domestic extremism.
The FOIAs also aim to reveal the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) role in flagging what are said to be “conservative-coded” transactions (the keywords here are reported to be, “Trump,” “MAGA”, etc.)
Customers who subscribed to “extremist” news outlets or were buying religious texts are also believed to have been flagged by their banks – on FinCEN’s orders.
Unlike social media repression in the form of censored speech, the goal here was to put those flagged transactions under (government) investigation.
ADF believed that might amount to cases of warrantless surveillance of Americans’ financial data.
The FOIA requests concerning the FBI have to do with the Southern Poverty Law Center, that together with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue put together blacklists of “hate groups” and, “encouraged banks and financial organizations to target their customers based on those lists,” said ADF’s legal counsel Mercer Martin.
Another FOIA addressed to the FBI seeks access to any communications with Google, Instagram, Facebook, and others that include these keywords: “disinformation,” “election integrity,” “election interference,” “hate speech,” and “lab leak.”
