Whistleblower says Bank of America handed over private customer info to the FBI to flag gun purchases
By jdheyes // 2023-03-10
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Americans vote for people to represent them ever two years and for someone to lead the country every four years, but it's more than obvious that the citizenry has completely lost any control over our government, which is 180 degrees the opposite of what our founders envisioned nearly 250 years ago. The most recent case in point: In February, a whistleblower testified in a closed-door interview with the House Judiciary Committee that a significant financial institution had engaged in inappropriate data mining of its customers' bank information to assist the FBI in their investigations into the January 6 riots, Breitbart News reported this week. Based on a transcript of his testimony reviewed by Breitbart News, George Hill, a retired FBI National Security Intelligence Supervisor who was stationed in the Boston Field Office in 2021, stated that Bank of America had supplied the FBI with a list of all customers who had made transactions in or around Washington D.C. between January 5 and 7, 2021. So much for the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of citizens' privacy. Bank of America had "no directive from the FBI' to compile the list," said Hill, adding that the bank gave priority to individuals who had purchased a firearm using any Bank of America product, such as a debit or credit card, by placing them at the top of the list. Hill gave his testimony during the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government's investigation into several allegations of civil liberties violations by agencies within the executive branch, Breitbart News noted further. According to Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), he has received "dozens" of complaints from FBI whistleblowers that may be relevant to the subcommittee's investigation into civil liberties abuses by executive branch agencies since Biden took office. This year, both Jordan and Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, which oversees the weaponization subcommittee, have conducted interviews with three FBI whistleblowers, including Hill. As a result of these interviews, the chairman recently asked FBI Director Christopher Wray to arrange interviews with 16 FBI employees to further investigate the matter. Last week, Democrats released a report that focused on discrediting the witnesses, whom they referred to as "so-called" whistleblowers. The report questioned the credibility of the three witnesses, with Hill being accused of providing unreliable testimony regarding Bank of America. “He had no knowledge of the actual origins of this supposed evidence, never used the evidence himself, and never looked at the actual document containing the information,” the Democrats said in their report, adding that the former FBI supervisor had involvement in “less than a dozen” cases related to January 6. The Democrats said they therefore could not “reasonably find this testimony reliable.” “In any event, that a large financial institution may have provided evidence to the FBI in the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol is hardly newsworthy, and certainly not evidence of FBI misconduct,” they argued. But according to the transcript of Hill's testimony, he was clear that he did not physically see the Bank of America list, but rather saw FBI communication about it, the outlet reported. “I did not see the list, but I did see the EC [electronic communication] that the FBI used it to bring it into the—into SENTINEL [FBI database],” Hill said. Hill also testified that the FBI's Washington Field Office (WFO), which has been accused by whistleblowers of delegating cases to field offices across the country to exaggerate their scope, attempted to coerce the Boston Field Office into investigating January 6 cases based on the Bank of America list. A supervisory special agent (SSA) with the Boston office said at the time that there was “‘no predication, there’s no crime that was committed by using a BoA product in the District or around the District’ and said, you know, ‘No further action required,’” Hill said, according to the transcript. “To which WFO came back on a peer-to-peer level, an SSA to SSA, and said, ‘No, you need to open up cases on these,’ to which he said, ‘No, we’re not going to,’” Hill added. Sources include: Breitbart.com NaturalNews.com
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