The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), is investigating whether the Bank of America provided data to the FBI about customers who made transactions in the days around January 6, 2021, in DC and surrounding areas.
In a letter to the bank’s CEO Brian Moynihan, Rep. Jordan and chairman of the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform and Antitrust, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), asked about the bank’s cooperation with the FBI.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
The investigation comes after an FBI whistleblower testified before Congress that the bank provided the FBI with private data on customers who used the bank’s cards between Janiary 5 and 7, 2021, “with no directive from the FBI” or warrant.
“This testimony is alarming,” Jordan and Massie wrote. “According to veteran FBI employees, [Bank of America] provided, without any legal process, private financial information of Americans to the most powerful law enforcement entity in the country.”
“This information appears to have had no individualized nexus to particularized criminal conduct, but was rather a data dump of customers’ transactions over a three-day period,” they wrote. “This information undoubtedly included private details about [Bank of America] customers who had nothing at all to do with the events of January 6.”
The lawmakers demanded that Bank of America provide all communications from January 1, 2021 to the present between its employees and consultants related to providing the FBI with financial records of customers. They also demanded all records of communications with the Department of Justice within the same period.
