Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, wants the Justice Department to hold Bank of America accountable for its violations of anti-money laundering and sanctions laws.
In a letter Thursday to Attorney General Todd Blanche, Warren called $1.21 billion in recent penalties “a slap on the wrist” for the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank, which admitted to regulators that it “willfully” violated the Bank Secrecy Act and failed to report over $5 billion in suspicious activity from 2019 to 2023.
The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed fines on the bank – the OCC’s biggest ever, and the Treasury’s third-biggest – earlier this month, but Warren wants DOJ participation.
“I ask the Department of Justice to conduct a full criminal investigation and, if the facts warrant, prosecute the bank and its executives for their failures to follow the law,” she wrote.
The bank failed to implement and maintain an anti-money laundering program that satisfied the BSA and FinCEN regulations, and failed to conduct due diligence for correspondent accounts for foreign financial institutions, regulators said.
Over several years, Bank of America failed to properly monitor trillions of dollars of transactions, and, as a result, processed millions of dollars that violated several sanctions programs and funded global terrorism, according to regulators.
“Bank of America’s conduct is particularly egregious because the bank was previously subject to a cease-and-desist order imposed by the OCC for serious deficiencies in its compliance program and adherence to the BSA,” Warren wrote. “The misconduct identified in the 2026 enforcement action extends beyond 2024, and the OCC found that the bank has not made sufficient progress in complying with the requirements of the 2024 order.”
The BSA, which requires banks to prevent money laundering, allows the government to assess both civil and criminal penalties against those who willfully violate it.
However, few bank executives in recent history have been criminally prosecuted for BSA violations. Changpeng Zhao, founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency company Binance, served four months in prison in 2024 for failing to maintain an effective AML program while at the helm of the company. He was pardoned by President Donald Trump last year.
Fines, on the other hand, are more common. American Express and its subsidiaries were ordered this month to pay $350 million to the OCC and the Federal Reserve for AML program failures; and Stockholm, Sweden-based SEB and its sole New York branch said it would pay $33 million to resolve a New York Department of Financial Services AML investigation.
But, according to Warren, “the type of penalties imposed by FinCEN and the OCC are not an adequate deterrent nor eliminate the profit incentives for repeated lawbreaking by large financial institutions.”
The $1.21 billion fine is about 0.036% of Bank of America’s $3.4 trillion in assets. That’s equivalent to a $35.59 charge on $100,000.
Warren posed two questions to Blanche: Did, or will, the DOJ criminally investigate Bank of America’s failures? And does it plan to coordinate with FinCEN to make sure the bank is complying with its Oct. 13 consent order?
She seeks a response by Nov. 12.
