JP Morgan Chase, which then-President Barack Obama singled out for praise in 2012, has delivered the banking records of Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich to the January 6 committee, despite his objections and pending lawsuit against the bank.
Budowich, according to the Washington Times, was only informed Wednesday that the bank had complied with a committee subpoena. As Breitbart News reported earlier this week, Budowich only found out about the subpoena on December 23, and filed a lawsuit on December 24 challenging the legality and constitutionality of the committee’s subpoena. The bank and the committee did not wait for the courts to rule, and the bank–represented by former Obama administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch — complied with the subpoena, with Budowich only learning about that fact from the federal judge in his case.
Lynch is remembered for a secretive meeting with former President Bill Clinton on the tarmac at an Arizona airport in 2016 while the Department of Justice was investigating his wife, Hillary Clinton, over her handling of State Department emails. That suggested a conflict of interest that eventually caused Lynch to step back from — but not recuse herself from — the case.
Budowich is now filing another lawsuit to force the committee to “disgorge” the financial documents it seized from him. He notes that he had already cooperated voluntarily with the committee until it began pursuing his private banking information.
Several other former Trump aides have sued the committee, which has tried to subpoena their private banking and telephone records without any clear reason for doing so. They have argued that the committee is exceeding its constitutional duty, that it is trying to perform a law enforcement function disguised as a legislative inquiry, and that it has violated the terms of its own enabling resolution by denying Republicans the ability to nominate their own chosen representatives to the committee.
In a statement to the Times, Budowch accused the committee and JP Morgan Chase of a “collaborated strategy” against him.
Obama called JP Morgan Chase “one of the best-managed banks there is,” and praised CEO Jamie Dimon — statements that became even more controversial when it was revealed that he personally had up to $1 million invested in the bank.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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