(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) House Republicans have launched an investigation into Bank of America’s alleged collusion with the FBI, as the financial institution faces harsh criticism for reportedly providing the data of January 6 protestors to the embattled federal agency. Bank of America, a whistleblower said, provided the information voluntarily and with no warrants.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., a member of the weaponization subcommittee, sent a damning letter to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, notifying him of the GOP probe and demanding all related documents to be turned over to the Judiciary Committee.
“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 noted.
Jordan and Massie cited the testimony of an FBI whistleblower, retired FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill, who said that the financial institution “voluntarily and without any legal process” funneled to the agency “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.”
Hill also indicated that the bank investigated customers who bought weapons during that time frame. “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,” Hill said, who was joined by his former supervisor, Special Agent-in-Charge of the Boston Field Office Joseph Bonavolonta.
🚨 Chairmen @Jim_Jordan and @RepThomasMassie launch investigation into Bank of America voluntarily sharing customers’ private financial data with the FBI.
Read the letter ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/dGVI6A49eQ
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) May 25, 2023
“This information undoubtedly included private details about BoA customers who had nothing at all to do with the events of January 6,” they continued, according to Just The News.
Massie torched Bank of America for reporting the information without a warrant to the FBI in an interview with Fox News’s Fox & Friends Weekend on Saturday.
“If you bought so much as a hot dog with a credit card or a debit card from Bank of America on January 5, January 6 or January 7 in Washington, D.C., in 2021, they put you in a list and gave it to the FBI,” Massie told host Will Cain.
“They enhanced that list by data mining the private records of their customers to see anybody who’s bought a firearm and that wasn’t geofenced of limited by that day and that’s very disturbing,” Massie added of Bank of America.
