House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed Bank of America this week over lawmakers’ investigation into the sharing of private financial data with the FBI related to the January 6 riot.
In a letter to BoA CEO Brian Moynihan, Jordan said that the bank had not yet provided lawmakers on the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government with all the necessary communications and documents they had requested.
Specifically, Jordan said the bank had not turned over a “filing” that it had sent to the FBI after the agency requested financial data from individuals who had been in the Washington, D.C., area around January 6, 2021.
Jordan said that the BoA gave the FBI a list of all individuals who had made purchases in the D.C. area around January 6 “without any legal process.”
“Documents obtained by the Committee and Select Subcommittee show that the FBI also provided BoA with specific search query terms, indicating that the FBI was ‘interested in all financial relationships’ of BoA customers transacting in Washington D.C. and that had made ‘ANY historical purchase’ of a firearm, or those who had purchased a hotel, Airbnb, or airline travel within a given date range,” Jordan said.
The bank has said that it handed over the information in a legal process that was begun by the Department of Treasury. Jordan said the records the committee had so far viewed indicated that the FBI was the agency that reached out, not the Treasury Department.
“As a result, it is unclear what ‘legal’ process permits the FBI or BoA to share the sensitive customer information of potentially thousands of BoA customers and implicate them in a federal law enforcement investigation without any clear criminal nexus,” he wrote.
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Jordan said that if the FBI did have such authority, then Congress would need to act to protect Americans’ financial privacy.
“It should not be the case that federal law enforcement has carte blanche access to Americans’ financial information by deeming a transaction or class of transactions as ‘suspicious’ or otherwise,” he said.
The probe into the BoA’s cooperation with the FBI is just one aspect of House Republicans’ investigation into the politicization of federal government agencies. The committee has also looked at governmental pressure to censor information on social media.