House Judiciary Committee Requests Documents over Bank of America Giving FBI Private Info

The House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Bank of America (BoA) CEO Brian Moynihan requiring documents and communications surrounding the bank’s decision to provide the FBI with their customers’ private banking information “voluntarily and without any legal process.”

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust Chairman Thomas Massie (R-KY) sent a letter to Bank of America after FBI whistleblowers testified that the bank provided a list of anyone who used their services in the Washington, DC, area regardless of whether or not they participated in the January 6 protests.

Massie and Jordan emphasized that Bank of America provided the FBI with this information “voluntarily and without any legal process.”

It remains unclear if Bank of America voluntarily provided Americans’ transaction data to the FBI Washington Field Office or if they complied with a bulk subpoena.

The conservatives wrote in their letter:

This testimony is alarming. According to veteran FBI employees, BoA 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 BoA customers’ transactions over a three-day period. This information undoubtedly included private details about BoA customers who had nothing at all to do with the events of January 6. Even worse, BoA specifically provided information about Americans who exercised their Second Amendment right to purchase a firearm.

The lawmakers asked Bank of America to provide the Judiciary Committee with all documents and communications relating to the provision of financial records to the FBI.

Massie, a member of the weaponization subcommittee, emphasized during the subcommittee’s mid-May hearing that an FBI whistleblower testified that there was no geolocation fencing regarding the datamining of Americans’ purchasing of firearms:

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) said that the BoA’s alleged turning over of Americans’ transactions amounts to “victimization at scale” of Americans:

A recent FBI audit found that the agency had “insufficient justification” for two FISA searches relating to “January 6th capitol violence.”