Originally published June 12, 2023 1:41 pm PDT
Chairmen Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) of the House Judiciary Committee and the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust respectively, have sent letters to several major banking institutions, raising questions about their potential voluntary sharing of customers’ private financial data with federal government agencies.
These queries stem from a prior investigation into Bank of America (BoA)’s actions in the wake of the events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
As per a report released by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, it was revealed that BoA “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 January 5 and January 7, 2021.”
The report also suggests that “individuals who had previously purchased a firearm with a BoA product were elevated to the top of the list regardless of when or where the purchase was made.”
Following this revelation, the Chairmen sent letters to Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Company, PNC Financial Services, Truist, U.S. Bankcorp, and Wells Fargo inquiring about similar practices.
The excerpt of the letter to JP Morgan Chase & Co. outlines the reason for the inquiry: “Based on this information, we are evaluating whether other financial institutions similarly provided federal law enforcement with private customer data without legal process.”
According to testimonies from retired FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill and Special Agent-inCharge of the Boston Field Office, Joseph Bonavolonta, BoA “with no directive from the FBI, data-mined its customer base” and produced a list of customers who had utilized their services during the specified date range.
It was noted that anyone who had purchased a firearm at any date was “put on top of that list.”
The letter indicates that the committee finds these testimonies “alarming.”
It states that “without any legal process, a major financial institution provided the private financial information of Americans to the most powerful law enforcement entity in the country.”
Furthermore, the Chairmen expressed concern that this information was provided “with no individualized nexus to particularized criminal conduct but was rather a data dump of customers’ transactions over a three-day period.”
The Chairmen emphasized the importance of protecting Americans’ private information from collection by federal law enforcement agencies without due process.
They highlighted that the Committee and Select Subcommittee “must understand if, how, and to what extent financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, worked with the FBI to collect Americans’ private data.”
The letter concludes with a formal request for a series of documents and communications dating from January 1, 2021, onwards that pertain to any potential provision of financial records to federal law enforcement entities, including the FBI.
You can read the full letters to the banks below:
