House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has issued records requests from the crowd-funding platform GoFundMe and the event-organizing platform Eventbrite, asking whether either organization helped federal authorities keep tabs on supporters of former President Donald Trump.
Mr. Jordan sent letters to GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan and Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz on Monday, seeking communications records between those platforms and federal agencies like the FBI or the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
Republican lawmakers have been probing allegations that FinCEN and other federal agencies reached out to financial institutions after the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and asked those organizations to review transactions based on search terms like “MAGA,“ ”Trump,“ and ”America First.”
Republicans, like Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), have also raised concerns that FinCEN asked financial institutions to delve into purchases of religious texts, as well as transactions that could indicate firearms purchases.
Confirming his department’s proliferation of search terms like “Trump” and “MAGA” to identify potential Jan. 6 offenders in January 2021, Treasury Department official Corey Tellez said these efforts were based on past anti-money laundering programs. Mr. Tellez, the acting assistant secretary for the Treasury Department’s Office of Legislative Affairs, also said that “while FinCEN provides guidance, it is ultimately a bank’s responsibility to determine” whether to file a suspicious activity report in connection with a specific transaction.
Mr. Jordan, by contrast, raised concerns that the search terms circulated by FinCEN indicate federal authorities pressed financial institutions to “comb through their customers’ private transactions and report charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression.”
“Despite these transactions having no apparent nexus to criminal activity—and, in fact, relate to Americans exercising their First Amendment rights—FinCEN seems to have adopted a characterization of these Americans as potential threat actors,” Mr. Jordan added in his Monday letters. “This kind of pervasive financial surveillance, carried out in coordination with federal law enforcement, without legal process, into Americans’ private transactions is alarming and raises serious concerns about the federal government’s potential abuses of Americans’ fundamental civil liberties.”
Mr. Jordan’s letters to the GoFundMe and EventBrite CEOs probe the degree to which these two platforms may have supported these FinCEN-prompted searches. The Ohio Republican asked Eventbrite and GoFundMe to provide records of communications with FinCEN or any other federal agency since Jan. 1, 2021, including documents and communications used to monitor or cancel certain fundraisers, events, or transactions.
In his letters, Mr. Jordan describes a Jan. 18, 2021 email FinCEN sent to financial institutions that specifically described Eventbrite and GoFundMe. This Jan. 18, 2021 email reportedly described how Eventbrite has been used to notify people about and sell bus tickets to attend certain demonstrations.
“After we received the letter and request for information from Rep. Jordan, Eventbrite conducted an extensive search of its email and file systems. We have found no record of being contacted by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN),” Eventbrite told NTD News in an email statement on Tuesday. “Our team will comply with legal requests when necessary in the course of investigations and thank Rep. Jordan for his request.”
NTD News also reached out to GoFundMe for comment but did not receive a response by press time.
From NTD News
