Justice Department Will End ‘Operation Choke Point’
Thank goodness!!
The Justice Department has decided to end former President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) controversial Operation Choke Point, which wanted to put an end credit to shady businesses.
Republicans fought against it because they claimed that the administration used the program to target legitimate businesses, including gun dealers.
Fox News reported:
Just days after top House Republicans had pressed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to shutter Operation Choke Point, the department confirmed in a response letter that the program is dead.
“All of the Department’s bank investigations conducted as part of Operation Chokepoint are now over, the initiative is no longer in effect, and it will not be undertaken again,” Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd said in the Aug. 16-dated letter, calling it a “misguided initiative” from the prior administration.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and the other GOP lawmakers had written to the DOJ last week asking the administration to formally “repudiate” the program’s guidelines.
The operation came under fire almost as soon as it began a few years ago. Reason points out that the operation never received “proper statutory authority by either the administration or Congress.” A Wall Street Journal article in 2013 confirmed that the administration “deliberately withheld” details of the operation from Congress.
Reason continued:
By labeling certain industries as being at a high risk for fraud, the feds were able to increase oversight requirements for some accounts to such a high level that it became unprofitable for banks to work with certain clients, explained Iain Murray, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s vice president of strategy, in a 2014 post at National Review Online.
As Murray pointed out, the Obama administration’s own guidance document for the program included a list of industries targeted with greater scrutiny, including payday loans, credit repair services, fireworks, firearms, ammunition, “As Seen on TV” products, gambling, home-based charities, pornography, online pharmaceuticals, and sweepstakes. Targets of Operation Choke Point—such as porn star Teagan Presley, who was profiled by Vice News in 2014—often didn’t have any idea why their bank accounts were being frozen or closed.
“The very premise is clearly chilling—the DOJ is coercing private businesses in an attempt to centrally engineer the American marketplace based on it’s own politically biased moral judgment,” wrote Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown in 2014.
Republicans on the Financial Services Committee discovered a list that the FDIC compiled “of ‘high-risk’ industries that produce ‘questionable or fraudulent goods and services.'” The committee members noticed that the list included those types of businesses, but “industries such as ‘firearms sales’ and ‘ammunition sales'” also made the list.
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Comments
The tendency for modern ‘progressives’ towards totalitarianism and suppression of speech and acts they don’t like is truly disturbing.
Imagine for just a second the complete shitstorm that the media would create if Trump even TALKED about doing something like this to companies that provided abortion.
The thing is, I believe there is a lot of actual criminality on the Democrat side (e.g. the Planned Parenthood videos by James O’Keefe). Trump should be prosecuting them, no matter how much the other side cries about it.
Then, after the wailing and excuses occur, he should present some damning evidence to expose the Dems as liars. Exactly as Andrew Brietbart would’ve done.
By their fruits you shall know them……..
Take a legal activity, and criminalize it. A lot like Alinsky. Whether selling a weapon, porn, smoking a cigarette – if it is legal, it is legal. It gets the full support of all the laws and regulations. If it is illegal, make it illegal, and all the consequences….
Thye told me if I voted for (insert GOP candidate for POTUS), that the entire administrative state would become a puritanical weapon to punish sinful behavior.
And since Wilson, they’ve been right…!!!
Anyone know if this could change the marijuana industries requirement of cash?
And when, by the way, will the DOJ end the ‘clinton’ investigation choke point?
What took so long?
It is going to take decades to undo all of the damage, illegal programs, and other actions by the Obama administration. As this happens the public and history will come to see Obama as a terrible president who took the law into his owns hands and ruled illegally by fiat.
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Obama and the Democrats will also be remembered for creating or supporting to the point of allowing to grow beyond all reason groups like the Black Block, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter who are now running rampant everywhere, are clearly out of control, and getting worse.
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Most of all, the public and history is now seeing more and more how the Democrat party is pushing a coup to get Trump out of office even if it means destroying the country to attain their goals.
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As the Democrats strain more and more to support these masked and violent groups, fight tooth and nail to subvert this administration, and continue with their campaign of lies, it is becoming more and more apparent that we are all watching the death throes of the Democrat party.
This is great, but it is also nothing more than a breather.
No laws have changed just a change in executive priorities. We are one election away from a return to the kind of tyranny that ChokePoint represented.
Republicans in the House and Senate are blowing it.
Those Congressmen should now introduce legislation to prohibit the practice once & for all. We get way too much of such ‘guidance’ from the un-elected bureaucracy, way to much ‘enabling’ legislation that permits such blatant abuse and not nearly enough actual legislation from those charged with that responsibility.
The have not ended it. They have suspended it. The next Democrat regime will revive it.