Bank regulators colluded with Justice Department officials to smother legitimate industries the administration wanted to eliminate, a congressional report found.
The program, known as Operation Choke Point, has been the focus of a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform probe for nearly a year.
The Department of Justice’s role in pressuring banks to drop the accounts of businesses deemed “objectionable” or “high-risk” by officials in President Obama’s administration was described in a May congressional report, but the committee’s latest findings point to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as playing a significant role in the effort.
FDIC officials produced the list of risky industries that later became the targets of Justice Department subpoenas, according to the report. Bank regulators grouped legal businesses such as home-based charities and firearms sales with “patently illegal” forms of commerce like pornography and “racist materials” in a 2011 article obtained by the committee.
Congressional investigators also uncovered documents that showed FDIC policy makers harbored “personal animus” toward payday lenders and used their agency’s oversight power to stifle the industry.
“This blanket call to target an entire industry is chilling: no reference is made to either safety and soundness or consumer protection,” the report said.
The committee cited an example in which a senior division of depositor and consumer protection official advised FDIC chairman Martin Gruenberg to include pornography in all discussions of payday lending because “including payday lenders in the same circle as pornographers and online gamblers will ultimately help with the messaging on this issue.”
A coordinated FDIC effort to separate short-term lending from the rest of the banking system had prompted more than 80 percent of banks to cut ties with payday lenders by June 2014, the report found.
Emails revealed regulators knew “that FDIC examiners are injecting personal-value judgments into the examination process” of the banks they oversee. In one such exchange, a regional FDIC supervisor told a bank its “reputation could suffer” if it continued doing business with payday lenders because, in a sense, “no amount of monitoring, controls, and risk-mitigation will be sufficient for FDIC.”
The latest Operation Choke Point report emphasized the “intensity” of the relationship between the Justice Department and the FDIC.
Senior officials from both agencies plotted ways to combine forces in a series of meetings on the initiative in 2013, the report said.
In addition, Justice officials gave two attorneys the banking agency had donated to Operation Choke Point access to a confidential Department of Justice database that let FDIC review the legal documents associated with subpoenas and “directly participate” in the initiative, according to congressional investigators.
Go here to read the full report.
