EXCLUSIVE: Alliance Defending Freedom Demands Answers On Biden Admin Censorship

The Alliance Defending Freedom is demanding answers from the federal government about the Biden administration’s weaponization of government against conservatives as part of its push to combat alleged domestic extremism. 

On Monday, ADF filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Treasury Department, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security about their work to combat so-called extremism under President Joe Biden. ADF believes that the information gleaned from the requests will shed greater light on how the Biden administration ordered banks to spy on the financial records of conservative Americans. 

“We sent these requests based on the belief that big banks and Big Tech are just as threatening to freedom as big brother,” Alliance Defending Freedom legal counsel Mercer Martin told The Daily Wire. “We have been going through the mounting evidence that the government, through these organizations, was enlisting big business and banks in its censorship schemes.” 

The FOIA request focuses largely on two aspects of the government’s actions under Biden.

First, ADF wants to know more about how the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) flagged conservative-coded transactions for potential investigation. Second, ADF wants to know the nature of the government’s work with private organizations, to identify domestic extremism and target so-called misinformation. 

Overall, Martin said the is was to identify how the Biden administration worked to “outsource censorship to private organizations and businesses.”

The FOIAs filed with the Treasury Department seek information on FinCEN’s “relationship with private organizations purportedly to combat domestic violent extremism” and “the government’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ private financial information.”

It was previously revealed that top officials at FinCEN ordered banks to comb through customer data if terms like “TRUMP” or “MAGA” were used in transactions. Banks were also provided to provide information if customers had purchased religious texts or subscriptions to “extremist” media outlets. 

ADF’s requests would require the Treasury Department to provide documents and communications with key words like “Christian,” “Catholic,” “radical traditional,” “Southern Poverty Law Center,” “capitol riot,” and January 6. 

The FOIAs also asked for communications between the Treasury Department and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an organization that labeled ADF a “hate group” in a report that was linked to by FinCEN. 

ADF’s FOIAs of the FBI seek information on the any documents related to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-Left organization the bureau cited in a memo warning about the radical about “radical-traditional Catholic” ideology

“The reason we’re interested in their work with the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue is that [the government was] using those organizations’ lists of so-called hate groups or targeted groups, they were using those lists to then encourage banks and financial organizations to target their customers based on those lists,” Martin told The Daily Wire. 

The FOIAs also request information on the FBI’s work with the Domestic Security Alliance Council to “collect Americans’ personal financial information from private financial institutions and encourage private financial institutions to monitor Americans’ financial activity.”

The Domestic Security Alliance is a public-private partnership that purportedly exists to promote “the timely and effective exchange of security and intelligence information between the federal government and the private sector.”

In a third FOIA to the FBI, ADF requested that the bureau provide any communications with key words like “disinformation,” “election integrity,” “election interference,” “hate speech,” or “lab leak” and Big Tech companies like Google, Instagram, Facebook, and others. 

Along similar lines, the request to the DHS ask for documents on its work to combat alleged domestic extremism with private organizations and the flagging of Americans’ banking transactions. 

Martin said that the goal of the requests was to bring accountability to the government and determine whether individuals’ constitutional rights had been violated. 

“If we find that the Biden administration was violating individuals constitutional rights, we are interested in taking action to vindicate those rights as well,” he said.