Listed ‘Hate Groups’ Get Financial Surveillance

The federal government circulated a list of “hate groups” to U.S. banks as part of its financial surveillance after Jan. 6, 2021, a tally compiled by left-of-center groups that featured a host of mainstream conservative organizations.

They included the Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, Liberty Counsel, Pacific Justice Institute, and Federation for American Immigration Reform, according to an investigation by the House Judiciary select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government.

The list was lifted from a 2020 report titled “Bankrolling Bigotry” by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Global Disinformation Index, a pair of left-wing advocacy groups based in London, and distributed in January 2021 by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN.

In addition, the list “draws a false equivalency between certain conservative civil society groups and the American Nazi Party and the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, suggesting FinCEN views them equally,” said the subcommittee report, released Wednesday.

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Federal law enforcement asked financial institutions to “conduct sweeping searches of individuals not suspected of committing any crimes,” the report said, by filtering Zelle payments with keywords such as “MAGA” and “TRUMP” and flagging purchases at firearms stores such as Cabela’s, Bass Pro Shop and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Federal authorities warned that “those Americans who expressed opposition to firearm regulations, open borders, COVID-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the ‘deep state’ may be potential domestic terrorists,” the subcommittee said.

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Jeremy Tedesco, Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel, told the subcommittee at a hearing Thursday that “viewpoint-based de-banking is on the rise.”

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