Hawley asks FBI director about consumer data collected in Capitol riot investigation
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley questioned FBI Director Christopher Wray about data the bureau has collected from banks, cellular companies and social media platforms in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Wray, appointed by former President Donald Trump in 2017, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday for a hearing on the Capitol riot, which was carried out by a crowd of Trump supporters seeking to overturn the election.
The FBI has made hundreds of arrests since the shocking attack, including nine in Missouri and four in Kansas. The bureau continues to investigate the events of the day and the planning by right wing groups.
Hawley’s questioning focused on data the bureau has collected in its investigation — rather than on the causes of the attack — suggesting that the agency may be overreaching its legal authority.
He asked Wray about geolocation data and metadata collected from cell phone companies. Wray said he could not speak to specific details about the ongoing investigation, that given the size and sprawl of the inquiry, it was likely that the FBI had collected both forms of data.
“I feel confident that we are using various legal authorities to look at metadata,” Wray said.
Hawley expressed frustration that Wray could not go into more detail on the matter.
“How are we going to know what you’re doing with it and how are we going to evaluate the bureau’s conduct if we don’t know what authorities you’re invoking, what precisely you’re doing, what you’re retaining?” Hawley said. “…You’re basically saying just trust us.”
Hawley, who sits on two of the committees investigating the Capitol attack, the Senate Judiciary and the Senate Homeland Security committees, has faced widespread backlash for his own role in events leading up to the deadly riot.
Hawley was the first senator to announce plans to object to President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, a move critics say contributed to the combustible atmosphere, and was photographed raising his fist in solidarity with a crowd of Trump supporters shortly before the riot.
Hawley has repeatedly rejected the criticism and touted his objection to the Electoral College results during a Friday appearance at the American Conservative Union’s CPAC conference.
He received huge applause, but critics say it showed his callousness about the riot, which cost the lives of five, including a Capitol Police officer.
“All you have to do is see Josh Hawley’s smug face at CPAC,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who voted to impeach Trump, told CNN Tuesday morning.
“There are five people dead, two that took their own life on top of that, as a result of what you did. It was embarrassing for us around the world,” Kinzinger said ahead of Tuesday’s hearing.
Hawley pressed Wray on data collected from Bank of America and other banks, citing a Fox News report that the nation’s second largest bank shared data on 211 customers with the FBI.
“We work with private sector partners, including financial institutions, in a variety of ways all the time in a variety of investigations,” Wray said.
Hawley said that federal law only allows banks to turn over consumer data if there’s probable cause a crime has been committed and suggested that may not have been the case for every customer.
“They’re just turning over reams of consumer data. That obviously would be a major legal problem,” he said.
Hawley, an outspoken critic of the tech industry, also asked Wray about whether the FBI had obtained user data from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon.
Wray said that he could not confirm that the bureau had contacted each of the companies Hawley mentioned, but said that it was working with social media companies in its investigation.
“Is the FBI currently pressuring any of these platform, these social media or tech platforms, to include backdoors in their software that would help defeat end to end encryption?” Hawley asked Wray.
Wray said the FBI was not trying to obtain backdoors to data, but he said it has urged companies to ensure that encryption does not become a way to prevent the bureau from obtaining data with a court order or warrant.
“We are concerned that if these companies continue to move in the trajectory they’re moving in we are going to find ourselves in a situation where no matter how bulletproof or ironclad the legal authority, no matter how compelling the circumstances, no matter how horrific the crime or heartbreaking the victim, we will not be able to get access to the content that we need to keep people safe,” Wray said.
This story was originally published March 2, 2021 at 1:49 PM.
