NEW WHITE PAPER UNCOVERS HOW FEDERAL BANKING REGULATORS ARE WAGING "OPERATION CHOKE POINT 2.0" AGAINST THE CRYPTOCURRENCY INDUSTRY

WASHINGTON, March 27, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- A new white paper from the Washington D.C. law firm Cooper & Kirk details evidence that the federal bank regulators—the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ("FDIC"), the Federal reserve Board, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ("OCC")—are waging a clandestine, financial war against the cryptocurrency industry. As the report describes, the federal regulators are using the same regulatory tools and pressure tactics that they used during the notorious "Operation Choke Point": the Obama administration's effort to use informal regulatory pressure and backroom threats to cut off payday lenders, gun and tobacco dealers, and other politically unpopular businesses from the modern financial system. Just like during Operation Choke Point, the banking agencies have now put out informal guidance documents tarring cryptocurrency customers as posing a supposedly heightened risk to banks. Businesses in the cryptocurrency industry are suddenly finding themselves debanked, and stripped of access to the ACH network, without explanation. And in the past few weeks, federal regulators effectively shut down a bank that was known to be serving the crypto industry—and then chose to shutter rather than sell the part of the bank that serves digital asset customers, at a cost of billions of dollars.

Cooper & Kirk successfully sued the FDIC, Federal Reserve, and OCC over the original Operation Choke Point, so the law firm is well positioned to recognize the signs that the Obama-era pattern of threats and pressure tactics was being deployed again, this time against crypto. "Even though the first Operation Choke Point was exposed and brought to a halt, we always feared that the regulatory tools that had been wielded against payday lenders and tobacco shops would be picked up again in the future and used against the next politically unpopular industry," said David H. Thompson, an attorney at Cooper & Kirk who was involved in the Firm's earlier litigation against Operation Choke Point and is the lead author of the new white paper. "It looks like that time has come, and crypto is now the industry with a target on its back. Congress must once again hold the federal banking regulators to account and ensure that this Operation Choke Point 2.0 is exposed and brought to an immediate halt, just like version 1.0," said Thompson.

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SOURCE Cooper & Kirk PLLC