The financial data sought about American citizens concerned gun purchases made January 5th through 7th, 2020 -- searching for gun crimes, without warrant or even suspicion, about Possible Future Insurrectionists.
And the information they sought concerned all Americans banking with Bank of America. All. Every single one. It wasn't just a list of January 6th "insurrections."
It was everyone.
FBI Director Christopher Wray admitted Wednesday the bureau colludes with businesses to collect information on innocent Americans.
...
"George Hill, former FBI supervisor and intelligence analyst in the Boston field office, told us that the Bank of America, with no legal process, gave to the FBI gun purchase records with no geographical boundaries, for anybody that was a Bank of America customer. Is that true?" Massie asked.
"Well, what I do know is that the, a number of business community partners all the time, including financial institutions, share information with us about possible criminal activity. My understanding is that that's fully lawful."
"Did you ask for that information--"
"In this specific incident that you're asking about, my understanding is that that information was shared with field offices for information only. But then recalled to avoid even the appearance of any kind of overreach. But my understanding is that is a fully lawful process," Wray said.
"Was there a warrant involved?"
"Again, my understanding is that the institution in question shared information with us, as happens all the time --"
"Did you request the information?" Massie pressed.
"I can't speak to the specifics."
Whistleblower George Hill says there's no possible way Wray couldn't know about "undercovers" walking among the innocent -- and guilty -- on January 6.
Hill said what "struck me between the eyes" was that Wray at least acknowledged "there were CHS's [Confidential Human Sources] and agents embedded in the Capitol."
"Again, I was the one who brought this to the attention of the Committee [last February] but he actually admitted it," he told WMAL radio host Vince Coglianese.
The host indicated that Wray wasn't sure there were undercover FBI agents in the crowd, to which Hill shot back, "That's a lie, OK?" And then he explained how he would know and how the director would have known: "Having organized multiple high-security events in my time in Boston, one of which was the Boston Marathon which I did for ten years -- organized the security around that event." And he claimed that "the FBI will always embed agents in the crowd in civilian attire." He said they'd do Terry stops when they had reasonable suspicion of a crime. "There's no way -- no way -- [not to have agents in the crowd]. The FBI would have had to violate its own protocol for decades not to have undercovers inside that crowd on January 6. It's not just normal, it's SOP, standard operating procedure."
"So that's a lie?" Coglianese asked.
"Absolutely," Hill confirmed. "I'd look him in the eye and tell him it's a lie. He would have had to have violated his own procedures going back decades [not to have agents in the crowd]."
Yesterday's hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray was another maddening experience of faux contrition and open evasion. Wray apologized for violations that have already been established by courts or Congress (often over the best efforts of the FBI).
Yes, Wray denies all crimes committed by the FBI until the moment they are proven beyond all reasonable doubt, at which point he says he apologizes for those crimes and Totally Takes Them Seriously You Guys.
And then he starts denying the next series of crimes.
However, on ample public evidence of new violations, Wray continued to use his favorite testimonial trilogy to dismiss any questions: expressing (1) lack of knowledge, (2) ongoing investigations, and (3) promises of later answers or briefings. He did, however, hold forth in detail after Rep. Eric Swalwell asked him about FBI Family Day. Despite the near total lack of substance, Wray did make one surprising denial. He insisted that the FBI does not engage in censorship efforts, focuses only on "foreign disinformation," and does not pressure companies to censor others. Those denials are not only directly contradicted by the recent 155-page opinion of a federal court and the Twitter Files, but a new release from the Twitter Files and journalist Matt Taibbi.
Wray said that "...The FBI is not in the business of moderating content, or causing any social media company to suppress or censor." He then added that these companies are not under any pressure in making their own decisions whether to censor people or groups flagged by the FBI.
The statement is obviously false. The FBI maintained a large operation of agents actively seeking the censorship of thousands, as discussed in my prior testimony.
Taibbi, however, has released another example of how aggressive the FBI was with social media companies. In the latest Twitter Files release, there is one email exchange where Twitter "immediately" suspended accounts flagged by the FBI without investigation.
Taibbi's new Twitter Files entry explains:
"In one shot, you can see the FBI asks to remove three accounts, that gets forwarded to Twitter, Twitter immediately suspends them, the accounts. But more importantly, when there's a glitch, and the accounts remain up, the FBI immediately writes back and says, what's the deal? We just wrote to you, why is it still up? So, that shows the nature of the relationship basically that it's not really a collaboration. It's much more like somebody reporting to an authority.
... [W]hat happens in these instances in the ones that I was showing, they're just forwarding names of accounts that they say are associated with foreign threat actors. It's very vague. And Twitter is taking them down before they even investigate. In this case, they later determined that they couldn't find anything connecting them to any bad actors. In fact, one of them was from Canada. And so, that's the problem. If it's not connected with a crime, they're just asking to take accounts down because they don't like the profile of them."