Former Republican lawmaker and candidate for Arizona Senate Mark Finchem has said in multiple interviews that a small-town Tennessee police department that is under criminal investigation gave him access to a confidential federal law enforcement database used for tracking financial transactions to prevent crime.
The GOP candidate, who served in the state House of Representatives from 2015 through 2022, has been making the rounds in the far-right media ecosystem touting an “investigation” being conducted by a nonprofit he runs that is involved in a bizarre, conspiracy-riddled probe into a Tennessee police department.
Earlier this month, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation raided the Millersville Police Department as part of what appears to be a criminal probe into the department’s assistant police chief, Shawn Taylor.
Taylor has said that he is working with Finchem’s non-profit, also includes a number of well known conspiracy theorists who have spread debunked claims, as an investigator. Two local district attorneys confirmed to Tennessee TV station NewsChannel 5 that the TBI had been asked to investigate Taylor’s possible use of sensitive law enforcement data to investigate his potential political enemies.
The investigation also involves the possible perjury of a Millersville detective during testimony he gave in a botched child predator sting, NewsChannel 5 reported.
Now, Finchem has been boasting about the access Taylor gave him to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network Database, commonly referred to as FinCen. The U.S. Department of Treasury database tracks private financial transactions to help law enforcement investigate financial crimes such as money laundering.
As first reported by NewsChannel 5, Finchem has said on multiple occasions that his group has had access to FinCen’s confidential financial data. In a podcast interview in September, he said that he had gotten “legitimate access through law enforcement channels” to FinCen but was “shut off” after they “started raising a ruckus.”
Finchem has claimed he and his organization have used the financial data to track supposed election fraud. He is a prominent election denier who has been sanctioned by the courts for his fact-free claims.
It is a federal crime to publicly disclose FinCen data. The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment about Finchem’s claims of using its data, and Finchem did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Unauthorized disclosure of FinCen data is “not only a violation of federal criminal law, but it undermines the very purpose for which the suspicious activity reporting system was created,” the FinCen website says. The website further says that unauthorized disclosure can “compromise the national security of the United States as well as threaten the safety and security of those institutions and individuals who file such reports.”
There is precedent for prosecutions of illegally sharing FinCen data. In 2020, former Treasury official Natalie Edwards was sentenced to six months in prison after she leaked FinCen data to a journalist about suspicious transactions involving Donald Trump and his campaign chair Paul Manafort.
Taylor, the Tennessee cop working with Finchem, has also spoken multiple times about his desire to use FinCen data to investigate conspiracy theories, according to NewsChannel 5.
Finchem unsuccessfully ran for secretary of state in 2022. Earlier this year, he won the Republican primary for the Senate seat in heavily Republican Legislative District 1 in July and is all but assured of returning to the Arizona Legislature in January. Finchem has built his brand on election fraud and other conspiracy theories, and is also known for his association with and support from extremist groups like the Oath Keepers.
In an interview on the 23rd anniversary of the deadly 9/11 attacks, Finchem spoke with an antisemitic conspiracy theorist about the “investigation” and both men alluded to the QAnon conspiracy theory.
In its simplest form, the complex and damaging QAnon conspiracy theory alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles are running a global sex-trafficking ring, control world governments and are trying to bring down former President Donald Trump — who is himself single-handedly dismantling the cabal.
Throughout the Sept. 11 interview, Finchem made a number of conspiratorial claims without evidence, including accusing the judge in the Tennessee case, as well as others, of being involved in child sex trafficking. He claimed that the Tennessee-based journalist who has written about Taylor’s ties to conspiracy theorists is providing cover to perverts and sex traffickers.
Finchem repeated Taylor’s false claim that an agent with TBI urinated in Taylor’s bathtub and claimed to have DNA evidence related to that allegation.
Finchem has often courted those from the fringe and especially those in the QAnon world. He has spoken at their conventions and held fundraisers with known QAnon believers and 9/11 truthers.
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