North Carolina Republican Dan Bishop said this week that the Bank of America provided the FBI with private financial information about anyone who was in Washington, D.C., from January 5-7, 2021. 

Bishop, a member of the Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, said that the federal government had widely victimized Americans through widespread surveillance, even those not accused of any wrongdoing on January 6. 

“Bank of America gave a list to the FBI of anyone who used BofA credit/debit cards in the DC area between Jan 5-7th, 2021 — regardless of whether they participated in the events of Jan. 6th,” he said on Twitter. 

Bank of America gave a list to the FBI of anyone who used BofA credit/debit cards in the DC area between Jan 5-7th, 2021 – regardless of whether they participated in the events of Jan. 6th. pic.twitter.com/C0zBA1AGmy

— Rep. Dan Bishop (@RepDanBishop) May 18, 2023

During remarks at a hearing of the committee on Thursday, the North Carolina Republican referenced whistleblower testimony that the bank had voluntarily turned over credit card transactions for anyone who was in the D.C. area around January 6. 

“There are victims all over the place, all of the people who suffered when the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security got involved in censorship with social media platforms, millions and millions of tweets and narratives being taken down, that is victimization at scale,” Bishop said. 

The whistleblower’s claims were highlighted in a report from the weaponization committee that characterized the testimony as “highly alarming.”

“The FBI seemingly worked with a major financial institution to receive, without legal process, financial records about Americans who used credit or debit cards to purchase hotels, flights, or firearms in close proximity to January 6, 2021. This invasion of the privacy of American citizens in this manner is decidedly concerning,” the report said. 

Other Republicans backed up Bishop, calling for more protections for the liberty of Americans, with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) referring to the Bank of America’s “astonishing conduct.” 

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“Financial privacy is a cornerstone of individual liberty,” West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore said. “Big banks and big government colluding to violate the privacy of American citizens without a warrant is dangerous and unacceptable.”

In response to the allegations, Bank of America said that it, “follows all applicable laws and regulatory requirements to receive, evaluate, process, safeguard and narrowly respond to law enforcement requests.”

On Friday, Bishop said that the FBI was “rotten to the core” in response to another report that the FBI had wrongly accessed data for hundreds of thousands of Americans. 

“Rotten to the core. It’s far past time to cut their budget and institute significant reforms. The weaponization of the federal government must end,” Bishop said. 

New York City is having a bit of trouble with repeat retail crime offenders, but Mayor Eric Adams’ latest soft-on-crime approach to solving the problem is downright laughable.

You’ve all seen the videos — a number of punks barge into a store at once, grab whatever they can, and then flee the scene. Here’s an example of what that looks like:

Per Fox 5, retail theft in general jumped 44% in 2022 in NYC. The crisis is so bad that Adams even mandated that masks should be taken off to enter stores — the opposite of the COVID days — to help reduce this sort of crime.

It apparently didn’t work because now he has a new plan, one that he says is top-notch.

“Last year alone, 327 repeat offenders were responsible for 30 percent of the more than 22,000 retail thefts across our city, ” Adams said this week. “This hurt our businesses, our workers, our customers, and our city.”

That’s putting it mildly, Adams, but let’s hear what this plan does.

“This plan will help us invest in diversion programs and in underlying factors leading to retail theft, work upstream to stop some of the factors leading to a crime before one takes place, trains retail workers in de-escalation tactics and security best practices, and takes numerous actions to increase necessary enforcement against repeat shoplifters and deter organized crime rings perpetrating these thefts,” he said.

Wow, based on that you might expect the Big Apple to be returning to its days of broken-window policies, stop-and-frisk, and other tough-on-crime methods. Nope, you’d be wrong to expect that.

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According to Fox 5, the plan “includes giving first-time offenders intervention programs instead of prosecution, de-escalation training for retail employees, establishing neighborhood retail watch groups to share information about a theft in real-time with one another and the police, and installing kiosks in stores to connect would-be thieves with social service programs.”

What sort of criminal, intent on stealing everything and anything he can, would stop and say, “Hey, look, a kiosk. I think I’ll get a pamphlet.”

Ralph Cilento, a retired NYPD Lieutenant Commander of Detectives and adjunct professor, also wasn’t very impressed with the strategy.

“So when people come in that were just about to steal, they won’t because they realize that stealing is a source of a different problem for them. So they’re going to use the kiosk to access social services,” Cilento told the local Fox affiliate. “I’m sorry, but that’s just a pipe dream. And that is he’s doing that specifically to satisfy his liberal base, which I understand he has to do.”

And Cilento hit the nail on the head with that last part. Despite the Democrats’ insistence that they support the police as well as law and order, they know that if they ever put in the policies needed to stop this problem, then the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s of the world would protest to no end. So the best they can offer is a kiosk, a slap on the wrist, and training for innocent store employees.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.