As banks face congressional subpoenas, a House Democrat objects

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Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, said he is concerned over the use of subpoenas on banks in investigations into Hunter Biden, and wrote to the chairman of that panel. 

The subpoenas represent a new chapter in the ongoing dilemma that banks face, caught between obligations to protect data privacy and those banks' larger desire to eschew political debates. Earlier in October, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., issued multiple subpoenas to unnamed financial institutions for a large number of records concerning Hunter Biden and his associates, as well as other members of the President's family. 

Among the complaints in his letter, obtained by American Banker, Raskin said that the subpoenas go too far into private citizens' financial records. This is an area of concern for banks as they become increasingly enmeshed in political debates, given the vast repository of financial data they hold about individual customers, and the potential that data has to be used against those people to political ends. 

"These subpoenas seek a decade's worth of personal financial information of private citizens and are completely untethered to any plausible theory of an impeachable offense," Raskin wrote. "Your decision to issue a blanket demand for 'all financial records' from 2014 to the present, without any effort to define or tailor the request, makes obvious that these subpoenas are nothing but a fishing expedition many miles away from the legislative shore and thus an egregious abuse of this Committee's authority." 

A similar issue bubbled up recently in an August conflict between House Republicans and law enforcement, over banks sharing some data with law enforcement during investigations into the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The House Judiciary Committee, at the time, subpoenaed Citi for documents related to House Republicans' belief that major banks illegally shared private financial data with the Federal Bureau of Investigation related to the Jan. 6 insurrection. 

Republicans were concerned that banks appeared to have shared some data about individuals who made certain purchases and transactions. The transactions in question include Airbnb, hotel or airline travel reservations in the Washington, D.C., area in the days leading up to Jan. 6. 

In the Hunter Biden subpoenas, Raskin said that Democratic staff had been excluded from Republicans' calls with banks about their approach to responding to subpoenas. 

"These subpoenas represent a stunning abuse of the Committee's subpoena

authority and create a deeply troubling precedent of using the power of the gavel to demand unfettered access to private citizens' irrelevant financial records," Raskin said.