Two extremist groups financed by billionaire George Soros have been named in the emerging scandal involving federal law enforcement colluding with financial institutions to spy on Americans’ private transactions.
Part of this Orwellian collusion involved federal law enforcement circulating documents to private financial institutions to jawbone them into giving up sensitive customer data, without them necessarily having to be suspected of committing any crimes. One of the scariest examples involved federal law enforcement passing around a 2020 “hate groups” blacklist to financial institutions that included “conservative” and faith-based organizations, according to The Washington Times. The circulated list was drafted in a report by none other than the anti-free speech Soros-funded, U.K.-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Soros and taxpayer-funded Global Disinformation Index (GDI).
Soros funneled at least $3,149,863 into ISD’s coffers between 2017 and 2022, while Soros gave GDI $150,000 in 2022 alone. GDI — revealed as a leftist and government-backed effort to silence conservative viewpoints by intimidating advertisers — had three members on its board that were tied to Soros, including Soros’ Open Society Initiative for Europe division director Finn Heinrich. The 2020 “hate groups” ISD/GDI list circulated by federal law enforcement specifically targeted groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, Liberty Counsel, Pacific Justice Institute and Federation for American Immigration Reform.
The House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a 36-page interim report on March 6, revealing a “mass” government spying effort. “This financial surveillance was not predicated on any specific evidence of particularized criminal conduct and, even worse, it keyed on terms and specific transactions that concerned core political and religious expression protected by the Constitution.”
Old Glory Bank Chief Strategy Officer Eric Ohlhausen ripped this grotesque field of government collusion in a press release. “‘In America, we should never investigate people and track their financial transactions based on values, beliefs or politics. A fundamental tenet of American liberty is to forbid illegal search and seizure,” Ohlhausen said. “‘If any financial institution assisted the Government in violating the Constitutional rights of their customers, those banks should immediately come forward and disclose what they did.’” In response to other revelations of government "snooping" through private transactions uncovered in February, Old Glory Bank released its Banking Bill of Rights to reaffirm its commitment to rebut efforts at wanton government infringement into banking customers' privacy. The "Rights" are listed as follows:
- "Freedom of Association: the right to bank without the risk of cancellation because of your faith, industry, or beliefs.
- Freedom of Financial Privacy: the right to banking privacy, shielded from improper government snooping.
- Freedom From Censorship: the right to access online payment apps without the threat of cancellation by big tech censors.
- Freedom of Lifestyle: the right to banking services without restrictions imposed by a 'social credit score.'
- Freedom of American Values: the right to bank with institutions that respect and support your American values."
Ohlhausen told MRC Free Speech America in an exclusive interview that this backchanneling collusion was similar to what was revealed in The Twitter Files. “We’re seeing something very similar, which is government looking to private enterprise to perform actions that the government is not lawfully allowed to pursue. In this case it’s privacy infringement.” Ohlhausen said he hoped that these revelations “make banks going forward less willing to participate now that they’ve been exposed for” cooperating with potentially unlawful government overreach.
Ohlhausen concluded that attorneys must be “drooling over an opportunity to pursue this on behalf of aggrieved customers.” He suspected that if one were to investigate the financial institutions’ terms of service, “I can’t imagine that it would allow for voluntary sharing of personal transactions data with law enforcement with no legitimate suspicion of bad behavior.”
The endgame, said Ohlhausen, is emphasized by the federal government’s recent pattern of dystopian behavior, such as the FBI putting “boisterous” parents “at school board meetings” on domestic terror watchlists. The financial sector collusion element is more evidence pointing to an effort to create a “broad-based aggregation of individuals to target.” Ohlhausen slammed the banks who “voluntarily” cooperated with the gross federal law enforcement overreach, and noted that there was “nothing suggested that I’ve seen that they were legally compelled to honor these requests. And in fact, they seem to be doing whatever they could to be helpful in the process.” Ohlhausen also dissected the financial institutions’ behavior as being comparable to the shenanigans Big Tech and other leftist companies like Disney and Bud Light employed against their users and customers respectively:
I’m reminded of Twitter and media outlets complying with the suppression of news — a great example being the Hunter Biden laptop story in the weeks leading up to the previous presidential election. Why did those organizations agree to suppress news — completely going against what their mission should be? I’m also reminded of the Disneys and Anheuser-Busches of the world. What motivates them to shun their customers and behave in ways that perhaps seemingly insert ideology into their business practices?
The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) was specifically behind the circulation of the ISD/GDI document, according to the House report. The ISD/GDI document, the House Judiciary Committee noted in its report, “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.” If that wasn’t terrifying enough, federal law enforcement specifically sent the ISD/GDI document to banks “likely responsible for providing financial services to many of the listed ‘hate groups,’ without regard for the chilling effect it would have on protected speech and its potential to be weaponized against the groups by financial institutions,” the committee continued in its report.
The collaboration between the federal government and ISD specifically is also well-documented. The State Department was exposed in February 2023 for having awarded grant money to the ISD on the premise of advancing the so-called “development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” in the UK specifically and Europe more generally.
ISD became notorious for its February 2023 hissy fit over X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk daring to engage with “right-wing” Twitter accounts that it had already blacklisted. ISD’s blacklist included satire site The Babylon Bee, Psychologist Jordan Peterson, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, Libs of TikTok and social media influencer Ian Miles Cheong. ISD even labeled left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald as a “right-wing account.” The fact that ISD is even remotely connected to the government’s efforts to spy on citizens’ transactions should terrify every American.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and an equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
