Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar has come out defending an Ottawa shop owner who made a donation to the Freedom Convoy in Canada.
Omar said journalists should not be reporting and publicizing the names of people who made ‘insignificant’ donations.
Omar tweeted in response to a newspaper editor from the Ottawa Citizen who had shared a report about Stella Luna Gelato Cafe in Ottawa, which was forced to close down after receiving continual threats.
The owner, Tammy Giuliani, had her name listed among donors who gave money via the GiveSendGo website to the Freedom Convoy, which is protesting the country’s vaccine mandates.
The entire list was made public following a hacking on Sunday. The data included names and email addresses.
Omar tweeted how she failed to understand why journalists felt the need to report on people who made donations as it resulted in harassment.
Tammy Giuliani was forced to shut down her business after she received an onslaught of threats over her $250 donation.
Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar has come out defending an Ottawa shop owner who made a donation to the Freedom Convoy in Canada
Squad member Ilhan Omar tweeted several times over the course of Wednesday evening
The owner, Tammy Giuliani, had her name listed among donors who gave money via the GiveSendGo website to the Freedom Convoy
‘I fail to see why any journalist felt the need to report on a shop owner making such a insignificant donation rather than to get them harassed. It’s unconscionable and journalists need to do better,’ Omar said in the tweet on Wednesday evening.
Giuliani operates two locations of her ice cream cafe in Ottawa which have been forced to shut down
‘I wish journalists wrote the articles they think they are writing. Sorry to say it, but your stories aren’t always balanced and often have a clear political bias. Calling it out isn’t harassment or journalist bashing. Everyone has a right to critique your story and its merits,’ Omar wrote hours later on Wednesday night.
‘Ps. I fully read the article multiple times and I still don’t believe there was merit to the story as reported other than further harassment. You all are entitled to your opinions, but my opinion remains the same. These kinds of stories ruin people’s lives and are uncalled for,’ she added in a follow-up post.
It’s not clear whether Giuliani was outed by journalists scouring the data, but her name had also appeared online as part of the leak of the hack after she wrote a post on a GiveSendGo message board.
‘We got a call from the team saying, ‘We’re getting phone calls here,’ Giuliani told the Ottawa Citizen.
‘I said, ‘What’s going on?’ and they said, ‘They’re threatening to throw bricks through our window. They’re threatening to come and get us.’
‘We said, ‘Lock the door and we’ll find out what’s going on.’
Tammy Giuliani was forced to shut down her business after she received an onslaught of threats over her $250 donation
The founder of GiveSendGo, Jacob Wells, has called for the FBI to investigate the illegal hack and to hunt down the hackers who have shared private citizens’ information online.
‘This seems well orchestrated. There’s strong political motivations behind this,’ he told Fox News.
‘This is illegal, and these people should be going to jail,’ Wells said. ‘The FBI – I mean, it’s surprising that we haven’t heard from any investigative services. We will be reaching out ourselves to just see that there’s some investigation into this. This is completely unacceptable.’
The attack on GiveSendGo on Sunday night redirected visitors to a taunting video from the Disney film Frozen, and a message slamming the Freedom Convoy as an ‘insurrection’ led by ‘known extremists.’
The hack has already had an impact on Canadians who donated – a top political aide to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Marion Isabeau-Ringuette, was forced out of her job when a local news outlet QP Briefing outed her to his office for making a $100 donation.
Canada’s national broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, has gone through the list of 92,844 donors to contact and publicly out them.
It revealed that the former leader of the country’s Progressive Conservative Party Ches Crosbie made an $800 donation. He was unapologetic when confronted by CBC journalists, saying: ‘Indefinite states of emergency, such as we are under in most of Canada, are a dangerous thing, a very dangerous thing. I support the right of peaceful protest and I see the Freedom Convoy as a peaceful protest.’
The CBC also outed a prominent business owner in London, Ontario, as giving the largest single donation to the Freedom Convoy. Holden Rhodes, who owns Killarney Mountain Lodge, donated $25,000.
GiveSendGo said it was a dedicated team ‘aggressively focused on identifying these malicious actors and pursuing actions against their cybercrime.’
Data from the breach revealed the Canadians only made up for 29 percent of the donor base. American’s made up 56 percent of the donor base, while UK donors made up 2 percent.
Frustration with the failure of Canadian police to lift blockades at the border and in the capital, along with scenes of protesters lounging in hot tubs near Parliament, ultimately drove Justin Trudeau to seek emergency powers earlier this week. Trudeau, seen on Thursday in Parliament, has been slammed by critics who accuse him of imposing ‘martial law’ to crush the protests over vaccine mandates and other pandemic restrictions
The GiveSendGo website became the most popular way to support the Freedom Convoy after GoFundMe shut its donation page down, freezing the $10 million raised after it claimed the movement had turned violent following police reports from Ottawa, Canada.
Wells said that as the donation page for the Freedom Convoy was the largest the website had ever seen, it had been preparing for a cyberattack prior to Sunday, but the company was still caught off guard.
‘We find it unacceptable on our side that this happened and that’s why we’re pouring into bringing on the best, Wells told Fox, referring to the company’s plan to call out ‘ethical hackers’ to test the site’s weaknesses.
‘We never want to see this happen, and it’s horrific to us that it has,’ he said. ‘The target on our back is really big because we do allow freedom and many people, they don’t like that. They’re going to come after us as hard as we need to be better than we’ve ever been before, and we’re bringing in people to make that happen.’
Wells added that he believed the hackers were part of a ‘highly coordinated’ and ‘very sophisticated’ group intent on attacking the Freedom Convoy.
In a statement released on Tuesday, GiveSendGo said it was a dedicated team ‘aggressively focused on identifying these malicious actors and pursuing actions against their cybercrime.’
The FBI declined to comment on the incident.
The US Department of Justice did not immediately respond to DailyMail.com’s request for comment.
GiveSendGo founder Jacob Wells (above) called on the FBI to investigate the hack on his company’s website that outed more than 92,000 donors of the Freedom Convoy
The leaked data from the hack has been used by Canadian journalists to out donors to their employers.
The country’s national broadcaster, Canadian Broadcasting Company, has also gone through the list to contact and publicly out donors.
It revealed that the former leader of the country’s Progressive Conservative Party Ches Crosbie made an $800 donation. He was unapologetic when confronted by CBC journalists, saying: ‘Indefinite states of emergency, such as we are under in most of Canada, are a dangerous thing, a very dangerous thing. I support the right of peaceful protest and I see the Freedom Convoy as a peaceful protest.’
The CBC also outed a prominent business owner in London, Ontario, as giving the largest single donation to the Freedom Convoy. Holden Rhodes, who owns Killarney Mountain Lodge, donated $25,000.
He was just as unapologetic after being outed by the CBC, telling journalists: ‘The overreach on the last two years has been astounding, but in the last two weeks in Canada it has been absolutely alarming for anyone believes in a peaceful and free society,’ he said. ‘Government at all levels has to realize they are elected to represent the people of Canada rather than lock up and threaten to arrest people for exercising their legal rights of peaceful protest.’
Hundreds of Canadians continue to protest the countries COVID-19 mandates as they march on the streets of Ottawa outside the country’s parliament, pictured on Wednesday
GiveSendGo said that the cyberattack was ‘highly coordinated’ and aimed at the Freedom Convoy for their protest of Canada’s COVID-19 mandates, pictured on Wednesday
The leaked data from the hacked GiveSendGo site revealed that most of the money raised for the Freedom Convoy did come from Canada and not the US – contradicting claims by the embattled Canadian prime minister.
Canadians donated $4.31 million to the anti-vaccine mandate protest while making up less than a third of all donors, compared with the $3.62 million given by Americans, according to the data. The rest of the $8.7 million came from the UK and several other countries.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had claimed that the majority of the donations came from foreign sources.
Americans did make the most individual donations to the Christian crowdfunding site, accounting for 56 percent of the 92,844 donors, compared to 29 percent of Canadians who donated.
While many donors remained anonymous, data from Sunday night’s breach by unidentified hackers revealed Silicon Valley investor Siebel donated $90,000 to the protesters, the New York Times reported.
Anti-COVID-19 vaccine mandate demonstrators leave in a truck convoy after blocking the highway at the busy U.S. border crossing in Coutts, Alberta on Tuesday
