House Judiciary Probes 13 Banks Alleged to Have Helped Feds Spy on Americans After Jan. 6

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R) and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (L) hold a news conference in the Longworth House Office Building on Capitol Hill, on Dec. 5, 2023. Win McNamee/Getty Images

The House Judiciary Committee has requested records from 13 financial institutions alleged to have helped the federal government in conducting financial surveillance on U.S. citizens after the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol breach.

Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sent letters to the institutions on April 25, demanding documents and communications, including the disclosure of private financial records to federal authorities without legal process.

The committee has previously sought information from Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, Citibank, and Truist for its probe.

The investigation has now been expanded to include several other companies: Standard Chartered, Western Union, Charles Schwab, HSBC, MUFG, PayPal, and Santander Bank.

“Documents obtained by the Committee and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government show that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) circulated specific materials to these banks, and the Committee believes that these banking institutions possess information necessary for the investigation,” it stated.

The committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have been conducting oversight of federal law enforcement’s receipt of information about U.S. citizens without legal process and by means of private-sector entities.

In a new interim report released on March 6, the committee claims to have uncovered “startling evidence,” proving the federal government pried into the private transactions of American consumers without specific evidence of any criminal conduct.

According to the report, federal law enforcement, including the Treasury Department’s FinCEN and the FBI, colluded with financial institutions in what boiled down to a “fishing expedition for Americans’ financial data.”

In the letters to the institutions, the committee said it was concerned “about how and to what extent federal law enforcement and financial institutions continue to spy on Americans by weaponizing backdoor information sharing and casting sprawling classes of transactions, purchase behavior, and protected political or religious expression as potentially suspicious or indicative of extremism.”

“Given the threat that such financial surveillance presents to Americans’ civil liberties, the Committee and the Select Subcommittee are expanding our oversight of the relationship between financial institutions and federal law enforcement to better understand its nature and duration,” it stated.

The committee also sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen asking her to provide all Bank Secrecy Act filings, “including Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), that included the tag created to group all SARs related to the events following January 6, 2021.”

The committee said it had requested Ms. Yellen to produce a SAR that was filed by the Bank of America on Jan. 17, 2021, which pertained to data on 211 individuals the bank shared with law enforcement.

Peter Sullivan, the FBI’s former financial sector liaison, testified at a transcribed interview with the weaponization committee on April 9 that other financial institutions also sent similar SAR filings directly to him, “relying on the same fact-based patterns created by the FBI and FinCEN.”

“To that end, FinCEN ‘created a tag’ to ‘group’ all SARs related to the events that occurred at the Capitol on January 6, 2021,” the letter stated.

“Given this coordination, the Committee and Select Subcommittee are concerned that the federal government, through the FBI and FinCEN, sent similar or identical thresholds to other financial institutions that manipulated the SAR filing process to elicit the information and transaction history of individuals without any allegation of federal criminal conduct,” it added.

Earlier this year, the Treasury Department admitted to helping law enforcement identify and arrest people allegedly involved in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach. It urged banks to comb through customers’ private transactions using terms like “MAGA” and “Trump.”

In January, allegations were also leveled at FinCEN, claiming the agency engaged in “pervasive financial surveillance” by circulating materials to banks that listed keywords that could be used to flag private financial transactions of potential Jan. 6 suspects. The materials also allegedly included instructions for banks to use indicators, including “the purchase of books” and subscriptions to media containing “extremist views.”

“Federal law enforcement agencies, including FinCEN and the FBI, treated lawful transactions as suspicious and shared information with financial institutions through backdoor channels, often circulating materials exhibiting a clear animus towards conservative viewpoints,” the committee report said.

Stephen Katte contributed to this report.