Free Republic

16 Republican AGs seek answers from Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf... ... debanking ... Wells Fargo is pushing the Biden administration's anti-gun and anti-traditional energy policies and discriminating against customers who don't fall in line with their political beliefs," Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen... As attorney general, it's my job to protect Montanans from discriminatory business practices. I will continue to investigate and fight against any illegal actions that could impact Montana businesses and consumers." ... Wells Fargo unexpectedly closed the business and personal accounts of Bradon Wexler, the owner of Florida-based firearms dealer Wex Gunworks, with a vague explanation...

Are radical liberals preparing for a civil war here?The evidence is all over.Don’t miss this show. 👇🏻https://t.co/UstpmolFUC— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) March 29, 2023

With the looming threat that the financial industry may shut its doors to the gun industry, a Utah man is hoping that his cryptocurrency geared toward purchasing firearms will take off. Since Democrats took full control of the government last month, a proposed rule that would protect businesses such as the firearms industry has been scuttled, opening the possibility that companies will see their financial services cut off. Rob McNealy, a Second Amendment supporter, created the Universal Settlement Coin (TUSC), a cryptocurrency that focuses on providing the firearms industry with a tool that would allow gun stores and firearm-related manufacturers...

Here’s the secret banks in Indiana don’t want Hoosiers to know. Big banks discriminate. They do it all the time and they’re fighting hard to make sure that doesn’t change. Banks have been openly discriminating against businesses they feel have fallen out of political favor. The firearm industry knows this all too well. This has been happening since the Obama administration, when then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder instituted Operation Choke Point. It was an illegal scheme contrived to use the muscle of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which backs banks’ assets with taxpayer funds, to force banks to deny banking...

The Trump administration adopted a new rule to prevent big banks from denying services to gun manufacturers and other industries in a rebuke of an Obama-era financial program. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) rule, which was finalized on Thursday, will instruct large financial institutions to only deny services to specific clients on a case-by-case basis instead of making industry-wide blacklists. The regulation came as a rebuke to Operation Choke Point, which sought to pressure big banks to cut ties with businesses disfavored by the Obama administration, including the gun and payday lending industries. Operation Choke Point—coupled...

It is no secret that the political Left’s wish list overflows with radical proposals that are far too unpopular to pass into law. Extreme, socialist ideas such as free college tuition, outlawing fossil fuels, speech restrictions, universal Medicare, open borders, firearm bans, and guaranteed income are just some of the menu items they dream of serving up to the American people. Thankfully, the vast majority of voters still find these ideas too hard to swallow. But liberals have never been known to let a little thing like democracy stand in the way of their grand schemes, or, as Democrat Rep....

he Obama administration used government power to target disfavored industries, and subsequently sought to avoid responsibility for its targeting program. The new information comes from a motion for summary judgement filed in federal court by the plaintiffs in Advance America et al. v. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. et al. Advance America, a payday lender, was one of the firms targeted by Operation Choke Point. The company contends—and the documents it filed show—that the FDIC was consciously working to target a totally legal industry, and also at a number of points to deny its involvement in the same work. Choke Point...

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), a leading conservative member of the House....told Breitbart News Daily on Wednesday that he believes that there is an interconnectivity between various high-profile Barack Obama-era scandals and the latest revelations about corruption at the Department of Justice and FBI. Gosar was asked during the interview on the SiriusXM 125 Patriot Channel show about the corruption on display in the release of the famed memo from House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) that detailed FISA court abuses by the FBI and DOJ in the lead-up to the 2016 election and in...

I mentioned in a recent column that the news was filled with stories about the protest-turned-riot in Charlottesville, the KKK, Neo Nazis, white supremists and let’s not forget Confederate statues. These are all WMD's- Weapons of Mass Distraction. They don’t affect the average American's life on a daily basis. What matters are high-quality jobs, the economy, GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the health of small business (which creates most private sector jobs), and the survival of the middle class (because they buy most of what everyone is selling). Like 63 million other Trump voters, I voted for President Trump to rescue...

The Trump administration has ended Operation Choke Point, the anti-fraud initiative started under the Obama administration that many Republicans argued was used to targeted gun retailers and other businesses that Democrats found objectionable. Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd told GOP representatives in a Wednesday letter that that the long-running program had ended, bringing a conclusion to a chapter in the Obama years that long provoked and angered conservatives who saw Choke Point as an extralegal crackdown on politically disfavored groups. "All of the department's bank investigations conducted as part of Operation Chokepoint are now over, the initiative is no longer...

A firearms dealer in North Carolina said his bank asked him to reveal “ridiculous and somewhat illegal” information about his business and its customers after the June 12 terrorist attack in Orlando, Florida, and he believes a secretive Justice Department program is to blame. Luke Lichterman, owner of Hunting and Defense in Tryon, North Carolina, said his bank told him he couldn’t use its services without completing an “addendum” supplying details about his business. “It all comes back to the Obama administration and Operation Choke Point, the ‘undesirable businesses’ thing,” Lichterman told The Daily Signal. “Something like that from the...

A North Carolina gun seller won a duel with his local bank, after the lender denied his web-based business its services, erroneously citing a controversial banking regulation, he told FoxNews.com Thursday. For months, Luke Lichterman had tried to get his Hometrust Bank branch to process purchases, but officials told him a 2013 Department of Justice regulation dubbed “Operation Choke Point” barred them from serving a “risky” business, he said. "When I asked the bank representative what other businesses are considered 'risky,' the first word out of his mouth was 'pornography,’” Lichterman, who is 75 and disabled from a serious car...

Skittish banks have been closing what they consider high-risk accounts, many of them held by money transfer firms and humanitarian organizations, prompting the U.S. Government Accountability Office to open an investigation, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. This week, the Journal detailed how such organizations have been forced out of the global banking system. More than 50 nonprofits sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Secretary of State John Kerry accusing banks and the Treasury of playing the blame game and doing little to solve the problem. They want the U.S. Treasury to state nonprofits aren’t inherently high-risk....

On Thursday, a bi-partisan majority of the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 766, the ‘‘Financial Institution Customer Protection Act of 2015,” sponsored by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO). As we reported last year, this bill targets the abuses of Operation Choke Point (OCP), an Obama administration “enforcement” program that lumped together legal and illegal businesses into a “high risk” category and threatened the banks with intense regulatory scrutiny. The goal of OCP was to deter the banks from forming or continuing relationships with the targeted industries, thereby driving them out of business. Included on this list were firearm and ammunition...

The House of Representatives concluded a tense debate Thursday by voting 250-169 to end a controversial Obama administration program called Operation Choke Point. Critics say the secretive program, run by the Department of Justice, has been used to target politically unpopular industries such as gun sellers. "We're elated," Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-Mo., one of the bill's co-sponsors, told The Daily Signal after the vote. "We've been working on this for two and a half years--we've been lied to, put off and dissed by the different regulatory agencies, and we've prevailed."Operation Choke Point was designed by the Justice Department in...

Watch Ted Cruz make DOJ nominee answer for targeting firearms companies with 'Operation Choke Point' Sen. Ted Cruz blasted one nominee for associate attorney general Wednesday for his participation in a Department of Justice scheme called "Operation Choke Point," a program that resulted in alleged attempts to run businesses the Obama administration deems undesirable into failure.The Texas Republican firebrand hammered the nominee, Stuart Delery, at Wednesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for his approval of the initiative in which DOJ lawyers intimidated banks into cutting off financial services to businesses such as gun manufacturers and dealers.The GOP presidential hopeful noted that...

The DOJ has acted as a partisan arm of the White House Sen. Cruz Questions Associate AG Nominee Stuart Delery on Operation Choke Point (video) WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today in a full Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) questioned the Hon. Stuart Delery, nominee for U.S. Associate Attorney General. Mr. Delery approved Operation Choke Point, a Department of Justice (DOJ) initiative that unconstitutionally sought to choke off access to banking services for gun dealers and other lawful business enterprises.“The DOJ has a long and bipartisan tradition of staying out of politics, of defending the law and the...

Operation Choke Point, the Obama administration’s under-the-radar project involving the Department of Justice, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) whose goal is to shut down industries it does not like by “choking off” their banking relationships, is taking aim at another business. Brian Lynn, CEO of a Jacksonville, Florida based payday lending company that operates 26 stores in Florida, Georgia and Alabama under the Speedy Cash and Lending Bear brands, has been in business for more than 20 years. He confirms to Breitbart News that two major banks closed his company’s accounts with...

Allison Deguisne, the owner of a small chain of Westshore Cash and Loan, says she will stop running the two-shop operation by the end of the month, and she blames federal government regulators. Ms. Deguisne can’t find creditors to help keep her California-based payday loan business afloat.

ACTION: Contact your Senators and urge them to cosponsor S. 477, the Firearms Manufacturers and Dealers Protection Act of 2015. Operation Choke Point a Threat to the Second Amendment About a year ago, the Second Amendment community was rocked by news that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) had teamed up with Attorney General Eric Holder to utterly destroy firearms manufacturers and dealers by cutting off all credit and banking relationships with them.For its part, the FDIC categorized gun and ammunition sales as a "high-risk business," lumping it in with drug dealers, pornographers, and Ponzi scheme operators -- all of...