In the News

WASHINGTON – Majority Whip Tom Emmer joined Fox Business Network’s The Evening Edit Wednesday to discuss the Biden administration’s weaponization of our financial system to attack their political opponents. 

Click here or above to watch the full interview.

Whip Emmer on the Biden administration’s surveillance state:

“Well, this is a parcel for what this administration is all about: Surveilling American citizens and more importantly surveilling their political opponents and then weaponizing government against them. In this case, you correctly point out the Judiciary Committee obtained documents from the treasury department that show that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network that is under the treasury’s umbrella, FinCEN as you referred to it, had directed banks to filter customer transactions using terms like ‘Trump’ and ‘MAGA.’ Literally, trying to surveil customer’s behaviors in a political sense. They also, Liz, went after credit cards. They want credit card companies, the banks who are administering some of this, to report certain merchant codes. A merchant code can be you bought clothing, you bought food, you charge it, it gets assigned a certain code. They are going back again to look for things like travel on January 6th with no known purpose. They are going back to look for other purchases of materials and ‘scary extremists,’ whatever their definition of that is. This is clearly using government, weaponizing it against your political opponents, and that appears to be what they're doing.”

Whip Emmer on what happens next:

“Well, the Judiciary Committee has requested a former head of FinCEN to give a 

transcribed statement where they can ask some in-depth questions and find out to your point Liz, how deep did this go? And you’re right. This stinks to high heaven when you think about the fact that our personal transactions – the banks don't want to do this. This is something that this treasury and this administration have been trying to do for the past three years. You might recall a couple years ago that, for credit card transactions with cumulative purchases, monthly purchases of $600 or more, they wanted our banks to report all those. It’s nothing more than a surveillance tool, and again, the scary part is, they use it against their political opponents. Americans just aren't going to put up with this. And this is why next November is so critical, and they are going to have a problem with things like this.”

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