House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Newsmax on Tuesday that federal government officials need to stop abusing the Bank Secrecy Act and working with banks to spy on Americans' financial transactions.
Jordan told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren" that "the misnamed Bank Secrecy Act" is "really not about keeping your information secret and private." Instead, he said, it's "a way to have the banks give information to the government."
"It used to be the banks would say, 'Oh, we see some suspicious activity here, like the local hardware store owner is suddenly doing $20,000 transfers every other day. Something's going on here.' And they would report that, which is, maybe there's some concerns with that alone," Jordan said. "But that's not what's happening now. It's the government going to the banks and saying, 'Hey, what do you think about this? Can you check on this customer or this person or this business entity?' And then the banks are giving that information, most importantly, without a warrant. We found that this information then goes to Treasury. It's in a database that can be searched, and in 2023, 14,000 federal government officials did three million searches of Americans' personal banking information, again, without a warrant. That is what's wrong. That's why we released the report, and this has got to stop."
When asked if the suspicious activity reports on Hunter Biden's overseas business transactions were requested by the government or flagged by the banks, Jordan said the banks actually reported those as suspicious.
"Those were actually ones where the bank said, 'Wait a minute, something's wrong,'" he said. "They weren't prompted by the government. There was no government official trying to encourage them to send something without a warrant. The bank said, 'This is legitimately suspicious activity Hunter Biden and the Biden family were engaged in.' So that, again, I think is sort of a contrast to what's going on now."
The Ohio congressman said that there have been individuals, especially in the cryptocurrency industry, who have been de-banked because "the government said something about them or did something" and the bank then decided "they're not a healthy risk."
"So we have that concern," Jordan said. "They're de-banking some and they're spying on others."
He said that Congress got wind of how the Bank Secrecy Act was being abused when an FBI whistleblower "came forward and told us that after Jan. 6, 2021, the FBI sent an email to Bank of America saying, and other banks as well, 'Give us any information, debit card, credit card information about your customers in the Washington, D.C., area for Jan. 5, 6, and 7, 2021, and then overlay that information with any purchase they've ever made of a firearm' without a warrant."
"So this is, again, how scary it has become and why we need to, I think, change the Bank Secrecy Act and have someone at the FBI who doesn't have this kind of behavior going on in that agency," Jordan said.
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