Weren’t we assured that Barack Obama went “into and out of office with not a whiff of scandal”? Yes we were. Former Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen told us so, as did many others. But it wasn’t true. There are many, the most recent a claim that Obama, and then Joe Biden, pressured bank executives to deny services to conservatives. It’s a serious charge that, like the Russia hoax, makes Watergate look like a sandbox squabble.
Here’s what we’ve learned: Acccording to Fox Business, major bank executives said “they were under pressure by the Obama and Biden administrations to deny services to individuals and businesses for political reasons.”
One executive said the “pressures were very, very real. When your regulator gives you a suggestion, it’s not a suggestion, it’s an order. The political stuff is very real, those pressures are real.”
This is known as “political debanking” and is “the involuntary termination of banking services to individuals and organizations based on their political or religious views,” says Todd J. Zywicki, a professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, who further “argues that access to financial services is a prerequisite for exercising constitutional rights.”
Zywicki’s March paper “traces the rise of political debanking from the Obama administration’s Operation Choke Point, which targeted disfavored industries under the guise of ‘reputation risk.’” It was expanded under Biden administration, during which “Melania Trump and Michael Flynn faced account closures for their political stances.”
Other “high-profile cases” included “the cancellation of accounts tied to Donald Trump Jr.’s events and the National Committee for Religious Freedom,” and “illustrate a growing weaponization of the financial system to suppress dissent.”
Operation Choke Point was a creation of the Obama Justice Department. Its mission was “to ‘choke out’ companies the administration considers a ‘high risk’ or otherwise objectionable, despite the fact that they are legal businesses,” says a House Oversight Committee report. “The goal of the initiative is to deny these merchants access to the banking and payments networks that every business needs to survive.”
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Author: Ruth King
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