Headline Roundup • February 16th, 2022
Funding of Freedom Convoy Stirs Controversy After Hackers Leak Donor List
Summary from the AllSides News Team
On Sunday night, hackers released a list of names of those who purportedly donated to Canada’s Freedom Convoy through Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo.
About 55,000 of the roughly 93,000 donors were American, according to a Tuesday analysis from the Washington Post (Lean Left); GiveSendGo told Fox Business (Lean Right) on Tuesday that roughly half of donations came from Americans. On Wednesday, police in Ottawa told the protesting truckers to clear the city’s streets or face criminal charges. The same day, two Canadian police departments froze 34 cryptocurrency wallets tied to Freedom Convoy funding after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau authorized the use of Canada’s Emergencies Act.
Coverage was somewhat more common in right-rated outlets. While some coverage in right-rated outlets tended to highlight threats against small donors in Canada, some coverage in left-rated outlets highlighted prominent Republican donors in the U.S.
Featured Coverage of this Story
(Blair Gable/Reuters)
Residents in wealthy enclaves across the United States — from Beverly Hills, Calif., to suburbs of Austin, to Florida beach communities — sent millions of dollars to support trucker convoys that occupied the Canadian capital and shut down commerce at key border crossings between the two nations, according to a Washington Post analysis of leaked fundraising data posted online over the past 48 hours.
(Fox News Digital/Lisa Bennatan)
Tammy Giuliani, owner of Stella Luna Gelato Café in Ottawa, Canada, was forced to shut down her business after an onslaught of threats was made because of her donation to the Ottawa trucker convoy protesting against coronavirus restrictions.
Giuliani donated $250 to the Freedom Convoy via fundraising platform GiveSendGo. After the site suffered a data breach, Giuliani's contribution was made public, and her restaurant began to receive phone calls threatening vandalism and violence.
"We got a call from the team saying, ‘We’re getting phone calls here,'" Giuliani told the Ottawa Citizen. "I said, ‘What’s...
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The Ontario Provincial Police and Royal Canadian Mounted Police ordered all regulated financial firms to cease facilitating any transactions from 34 crypto wallets tied to funding trucker-led protests in the country.
The federal police agencies, working with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), are investigating cryptocurrency donations supporting the weeks-long protest against Canada’s vaccine mandate. The protests are now deemed illegal under the Emergencies Act invoked by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the first time since the law was passed in 1988.
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