House Republicans are calling on Bank of America to come clean over whether it shared customer information with federal investigators looking into the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, chairman of the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust Subcommittee, sent a letter Thursday to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan requesting he share documents related to company’s cooperation with the FBI and the Department of Justice.
“The Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government are conducting oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation … and its receipt of information about American citizens from private entities,” the letter reads. “An FBI whistleblower has disclosed that shortly after the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Bank of America … provided the FBI — voluntarily and without any legal process — with a list of individuals who had made transactions in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area with a BoA credit or debit card between Jan. 5 and Jan. 7, 2021.”
The letter highlighted the testimony of retired FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill, who said Bank of America compiled a list of customers who used their debit and credit card transactions in that time and had purchased a firearm.
“This testimony is alarming,” Mr. Jordan and Mr. Massie wrote. “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.”
They added, “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 Jan. 6. Even worse, BoA specifically provided information about Americans who exercised their Second Amendment right to purchase a firearm.”
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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