David Kamnitzer

To Brian Moynihan, the Board of Directors, and the executives who run anti money laundering compliance at Bank of America @BankofAmerica: You are not our bank. We are your supply. Every dollar you lend, every point of interest you earn, every one of the $27 billion in profit you report each year begins as a deposit from an American family. You need us far more than we need you. I am writing to make sure every one of those families understands that, and to tell you what happens next. My name is Everett Stern. I am the @HSBC whistleblower. Fourteen years ago I gave up my career and risked my life to hand the United States government evidence of a bank moving money for cartels, terrorists, and sanctioned regimes. I did it in defense of this country. I am doing it again now. To the American people reading this, here is the situation in plain language. Every bank in America is required by law to stop money that belongs to drug cartels, terrorists, and sanctioned regimes. That is not paperwork. It is the wall between the people who want to kill Americans and the dollars they need to do it. On October 13, @USTreasury announced that at Bank of America, that wall came down. The bank did not deny it. In its own resolution with @FinCENnews, Bank of America admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act. Willful means it was not a mistake. Decisions were made, and the money moved. Here is what Treasury says moved. More than $5 billion in suspicious transactions that were never reported on time, over $1 billion of it tied to national security risks. Trillions of dollars that the bank’s monitoring system failed to properly watch at all. Transactions showing the fingerprints of Chinese money laundering networks. Trade-based laundering with a substantial nexus to the southwest border. Customers flagged for narcotics proceeds whose red flags sat unaddressed. And 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Belarus, Iran, Burma, Somalia, and global terrorism programs, including payments routed through blocked banks and designated individuals allowed to transact because the alerts were not calibrated to catch them. Regulators ordered the bank to fix this in December 2024. More than a year later, Treasury says, it still was not escalating suspicious activity. The price for all of that was $1.2 billion. Two weeks of profit. If a working family paid two weeks of income for helping move money for sanctioned regimes, we would call it an outrage. When America’s bank does it, we call it a settlement. @SecScottBessent said it himself when he announced the penalty: even the biggest financial institutions are not above the law. I agree with him. I am writing to find out whether he means it, and whether you do. Not one person has been charged. Not one. I am working with community leaders in Washington. Republicans and Democrats are standing behind this, because national security does not have a party. Millions of Americans have read my letters to Treasury in the past week. I am pressing Secretary Bessent to refer your board and your AML leadership to the @DOJCrimDiv for criminal prosecution, and I am calling on FBI Director @FBIDirectorKash to open the investigation that should have begun the day you admitted it. To the leadership of Bank of America, the American people have three questions, and I am asking them on their behalf. After your bank admitted to the government that it willfully broke the law, did one executive lose his job for it? Name him. Treasury says your program failed on staffing, training, monitoring, and audit, all at once. Tell the public what you rebuilt. Not what you spent. What you changed. Was anyone at Bank of America held personally responsible for what you admitted, or did the institution absorb it like a bad quarter? The American people are waiting for your answers. So am I. And if those answers do not come, Americans are prepared to respond accordingly, lawfully and peacefully, and in the one language a bank understands. Americans will take their deposits to community banks, credit unions, and regional banks that have never needed a billion-dollar settlement to learn the difference between a customer and a cartel. Americans will stand outside your branches, within the law, and say so. And I will be there with them. This is not a boycott. It is a free market telling a bank what it thinks of blood money. Because that is what this is. Every terrorist attack begins with a wire transfer. Every overdose of an American son or daughter starts at a bank where someone cleared an alert they should not have cleared. No settlement washes that off. The news cycle is not going to save you. The American people are not going to forget. And too big to jail ends here. Everett Stern HSBC Whistleblower Founder / Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit