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Congress Does Not Want to Hear About How ‘Mammoth’ Bank of America’s Nuts Are 9/21/09 at 10:36 AM
When House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chair Edolphus Towns subpoenaed Bank of America for any and all correspondence "created between September 1, 2008 and January 16, 2009" relating to "the financial losses at Merrill Lynch or to Bank of America's receipt of financial assistance from the United States Government" as part of the committee's investigation into the merger, BofA CEO Ken Lewis and the bank's lawyers apparently thought it would be hilarious to pile literally every e-mail that passed through their server onto the representative's desk. After sifting through the 70,000 pages of documents, Towns indicated his displeasure in a letter to the CEO on Friday. "You responded to this request by providing hundreds of pages of unrelated, extraneous information," he wrote.
For example, you sent copies of numerous emails you received from your own employees, expressing admiration for your "awesome" performance on 60 Minutes. You also included copies of emails alerting Bank of America employees to discounts at Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco, an announcement of the "Annual Pecan Sale" featuring "This Year's Crop of Mammoth Pecan Halves," and an invitation to attend a conference on investment in Asia, written in Chinese.
We have to say, this does seem like a pretty jerky move on Bank of America's behalf. But we don't think Towns should dismiss all the spam they included. For instance: Are there any e-mails between Ken Lewis and the people at Makeitlarger.com? Because those could be viewed as circumstantial evidence.