House Judiciary Committee leaders sent letters to several financial institutions on Monday, demanding to know what degree they worked with the FBI to collect Americans’ private data.
House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust chairman Thomas Massie (R-KY) sent a letter to executives at Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, PNC, Truist, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bancorp demanding to know if and to what extent these financial institutions cooperate with the FBI to collect Americans’ private data.
The inquiry follows FBI whistleblowers testifying that Bank of America (BOA) provided a list of anyone who used their services in the Washington, DC, area regardless of whether or not they participated in the January 6 protests.
Massie and Jordan wrote in their letter to Bank of America about Bank of America’s cooperation with the FBI:
This testimony is alarming. According to veteran FBI employees, BoA [Bank of America] provided, without any legal process, private financial information of Americans to the most powerful law enforcement entity in the country. 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. This information undoubtedly included private details about BoA customers who had nothing at all to do with the events of January 6. Even worse, BoA specifically provided information about Americans who exercised their Second Amendment right to purchase a firearm.
Massie, a member of the weaponization subcommittee, emphasized during the subcommittee’s mid-May hearing that an FBI whistleblower testified that there was no geolocation fencing regarding the datamining of Americans’ purchasing of firearms:
C-SPAN
Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) said that the BOA’s alleged turning over of Americans’ transactions amounts to “victimization at scale” of Americans:
Rep. Dan Bishop / Twitter
Massie wrote, “According to FBI whistleblowers, Bank of America shared private financial information of its customers (such as who had made purchases at gun stores) with the FBI, without a warrant or legal process. @Jim_Jordan and I are now demanding to know if other banks are doing the same.”
According to FBI whistleblowers, Bank of America shared private financial information of its customers (such as who had made purchases at gun stores) with the FBI, without a warrant or legal process. @Jim_Jordan and I are now demanding to know if other banks are doing the same. https://t.co/i3TQrfkGPP
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) June 12, 2023
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.