On Thursday, Congressman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, issued a subpoena to Bank of America seeking all information related to the bank’s decision to share private customer information with the FBI in the aftermath of the January 6th protests.
As Just The News reports, the committee issued a statement accompanying the subpoena, revealing that the FBI attempted to use this information to scrutinize many financial transactions by Bank of America customers who were in the area of Washington D.C. before, during, and after January 6th, including firearms purchases made during that time.
“In 2021, BoA provided the FBI—voluntarily and without any legal process—with a list of individuals who made transactions in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area using a BoA credit or debit card between January 5 and January 7, 2021,” said the committee in its press release. “When that information was brought to the attention of Steven Jensen, the FBI’s then-Section Chief of the Domestic Terrorism Operations Section, he acted to ‘pull’ the BoA information from FBI systems because ‘the leads lacked allegations of federal criminal conduct.'”
An investigation had previously been launched in May into Bank of America’s decision to voluntarily hand over the information. Chairman Jordan at the time asked for Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan to turn over all information relating to the compilation of customer data that the bank had given to the bureau.
“[T]he Committee has received 223 pages of documents responsive to our original requests,” Jordan wrote on Thursday to Moynihan. “However, to date, BoA has refused to provide the Committee and Select Subcommittee with the filing it turned over to the FBI.”
“Accordingly, and in light of your lack of compliance with our earlier voluntary request, please find attached a subpoena from the Committee on the Judiciary to compel the production of the requested documents,” Jordan continued. “To the extent that any responsive documents to the subpoena include information such as customer names, addresses, credit card numbers, birth dates, or social security numbers, the Committee requests that the information be redacted to protect personal identifiable information.”
The decision by Bank of America was widely panned as an invasion of customer privacy, and also for being too broad due to including customers who were simply in the D.C. area but didn’t even participate in the peaceful protests at the United States Capitol that day.
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