New documents in a legal filing from Citibank may shine light on the Trump administration’s anti-climate crusade.
In Wednesday’s court filing, the bank said it had temporarily frozen the accounts of climate grant recipients at the FBI’s recommendation. Citibank said it had been informed by the federal government that the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which issued the grants, was “subject to an ongoing criminal investigation.” This fund was authorized in 2022 through the Inflation Reduction Act and received $27 billion in funding.
Tech Crunch reported that the FBI asked Citibank to freeze several “nonprofit and state government agency accounts, including Habitat for Humanity, United Way, the Colorado Clean Energy Fund, and New York State Department of Taxation and Finance.”
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was authorized in 2022 through the Inflation Reduction Act.
Citibank’s filing says the FBI “recommended placing a 30-day administrative freeze on the accounts in light of ‘credible information’ of possible criminal violations,” including conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and wire fraud, and the bank added that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin had called for “the grant funds to immediately be returned.” Zeldin, who has a history of downplaying the impacts of climate change, announced Tuesday that the EPA had terminated $20 billion in grants from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to MSNBC’s request for comment.
These developments come as the Trump administration is seeking to deport a legal permanent resident of the U.S. from the country, seemingly over his political activism — raising concerns about the administration’s apparent willingness to use criminal probes and other tools in dubious ways that place its political opponents in the crosshairs.