A subpoena has been delivered to Bank of America by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), as his panel continues its inquiry into how financial institutions handled customer information in connection with the disturbance at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.
Jordan wrote to bank CEO Brian Moynihan, expressing his disappointment that the company had declined to give his committee the required records concerning inquiries about what data was sent to the FBI after the disturbance.
“On May 25, 2023, we requested your voluntary cooperation with our oversight efforts to determine the extent to which financial institutions, such as Bank of America Corporation (BoA), worked with the FBI to collect Americans’ data. In response, the Committee has received 223 pages of documents responsive to our original requests. However, to date, BoA has refused to provide the Committee and Select Subcommittee with the filing it turned over to the FBI,” the letter said, according to the Washington Examiner. Jordan said he was concerned about information the bank provided to the FBI “voluntarily and without any legal process,” adding if the bank had “lawful authority” to do so, then Congress ought to “consider reforms that adequately protect Americans’ information.”
“Indeed, if such a lawful authority exists, as BoA asserts, for BoA to freely share private financial information without any legal process or specific nexus to criminality, Congress has a responsibility to consider reforms that adequately protect Americans’ information,” the letter said. “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.”
It added: “For that reason, to inform such legislation, it is critical that the Committee understand the full extent of the information-sharing between BoA and the FBI, including review of BoA’s ‘filing’ that it emailed to the FBI.”
While this was going on, Jordan wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray in late September that seems to confirm the agency’s use of confidential human sources (CHS) to infiltrate crowds before to the disturbance.
Furthermore, Just the News claimed that the letter appears to suggest that the FBI was using CHSs under the supervision of field offices outside of Washington, D.C., and that the bureau might not have been able to sufficiently track them or their activities.