Last week, the House Judiciary Committee announced that it is looking into allegations that Bank of America shared with the FBI private financial information of its customers, the Washington Examiner reported.
In a letter to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan and Chairman Thomas Massie of the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust demanded all communications between Bank of America, the Justice Department, and the FBI related to the data dump.
The letter was prompted by whistleblower testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. According to a report released by the subcommittee, the FBI whistleblower alleged that Bank of America shared the private financial information of customers related to the January 6 riot without due process.
In their letter, Jordan and Massie note that the FBI whistleblower disclosed that the bank provided the FBI with a list of customers who made credit or debit card transactions in Washington DC and the wider DC metro area between January 5 and January 7.
Additionally, further testimony showed that the customers who purchased firearms at any time were placed at the top of the list, the letter said.
The lawmakers argue that the information did not appear to be based on individual criminal conduct but instead was a “data dump” of customer transactions over 3 days.
Jordan and Massie suggest that the information provided by Bank of America included private details of customers who had no involvement in the January 6 riot. They also called out Bank of America for providing data on Americans who were exercising their Second Amendment rights.
Explaining that Congress has a role in ensuring that the private information of Americans is protected from collection by federal law enforcement without due process, the lawmakers demanded communications from Bank of America to determine the extent it “worked with the FBI to collect Americans’ data.”
Jordan and Massie gave Bank of America until June 8 to provide the information requested.