The National Defense Authorization Act of 2021 weighs in at 1,400 pages, many of them dealing with matters well outside of the ostensible reason for the law, which is to lavish some three-quarters of a trillion dollars on the military-industrial complex. Since one of these was not punishing big tech companies for making President Trump angry, and because another directed the Pentagon to eventually stop honoring the president’s fellow traitors to their country, he petulantly and impotently vetoed the bill, which veto was more or less instantly overridden by Congress because spending more on the military than the next 10 most profligate countries in the world is the last bipartisan issue in America.
But there’s so much more in there than simply removing the names of those who took up arms against the United States of America from military installations which exist to protect the country from those who take up arms against it, more than enough to make up for not sticking it to Jeff Bezos on Trump’s way out the door. There is, for instance, a wholesale rewrite of American anti-money-laundering rules. There’s an overturning of the Supreme Court’s party-pooping vis-à-vis SEC disgorgement practices. There’s some good old-fashioned sticking it to China, albeit not enough to overcome the president’s self-pity party. And there are still, two weeks later, fun little Easter eggs to discover, much to Deutsche Bank’s dismay.
A provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, approved Jan. 1, allows the U.S. Treasury secretary or attorney general to subpoena records related to any account at a foreign bank with correspondent accounts in the U.S. The law applies to records held in the U.S. or abroad that are subject to federal criminal investigations or civil forfeiture actions.
Previously, the U.S. government’s authority was limited to records related to the correspondent accounts, including those related to the deposit of funds into a foreign bank…. Under the provision, if a foreign financial institution with a U.S. correspondent account is served with a subpoena, it would need to produce all requested records and authenticate the records without notifying any account holder. The financial institution can petition the relevant U.S. district court to modify or quash the subpoena, according to the law. The foreign bank can be held liable for monetary penalties and risk losing its corresponding relationship if it doesn’t comply with the subpoena, according to the law.
Defense Act Expands Scope of Foreign Bank Records U.S. Authorities Can Obtain [WSJ]