Sen. Carl Levin’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has examined the financial meltdown and JPMorgan’s “London Whale” debacle, is being urged to launch a probe into Bloomberg’s snooping scandal, The Post has learned.
At least one federal official has recommended that the powerful committee take the lead on investigating the extent of Bloomberg’s spying on Wall Street and government clients through its ubiquitous data terminals.
The privately held news and information giant falls outside of the scope of most financial regulators, noted one source.
A spokesman for the committee said it “does not generally comment on its work.”
Bloomberg has admitted that some reporters used the terminals to monitor when clients were signed into the service and what functions they were using.
Besides Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and other big banks, officials at the Fed and the US Treasury have also expressed concerns that they were being monitored.
Any investigation would follow widespread condemnation of the company’s behavior here and abroad.
Yesterday, the Bank of England — the equivalent of the US Federal Reserve — questioned the firm’s integrity and called its controversial practices “reprehensible.”
The BOE blasted Bloomberg a day after similar rebukes from the European Central Bank and Germany’s Bundesbank.
Bloomberg has been scrambling to placate miffed clients and repair its reputation since The Post broke the spying scandal.
The company is left to do damage control without longtime legal counsel Charles Glasser, who quietly left the firm in recent weeks.
A Bloomberg spokesman said Glasser’s departure is not connected to the snooping scandal.
Bloomberg’s news machine has been conspicuously quiet on the subject of snooping. That stance reflects a long-running policy instituted by Editor-in-Chief Matt Winkler of not reporting on the company, one insider said.
There is concern among some of Bloomberg’s bank clients that the company used client information to drive its own competing specialty businesses, such as equity trading and other units.