Weeks after three financial regulators fined Bank of America $1.21 billion, Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to know if criminal charges are coming.

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.

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