Trump allies open congressional inquiry into Capital One

Republicans on the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Thursday opened a formal inquiry into Capital One’s recent data breach, requesting CEO Richard Fairbank and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos arrange briefings to discuss the hack.

In a pair of letters obtained by CNBC, ranking member Jim Jordan, North Carolina’s Mark Meadows and Texas congressman Michael Cloud highlighted the wide-ranging impact of the breach and possible security implications for Amazon Web Service, the company’s popular cloud storage platform.

The three known Trump allies requested staff-level briefings on the matter no later than Aug. 15.

“Because AWS will provide the trusted Internet connection and cloud support for the 2020 Census and could potentially run the Department of Defense’s Join Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud computing system, the Committee may carefully examine the consequences of this breach,” the congressmen wrote.

The letters represent the first formal outreach by the Democratic-controlled House in relation to the Capital One hack. The company disclosed on Monday that a data breach identified earlier this month exposed the personal information of about 100 million people in the U.S.

The nation’s fifth-largest credit card issuer also revealed that about 140,000 Social Security numbers and around 80,000 linked bank account numbers were also compromised. Information including names, addresses, phone numbers, credit scores and credit limits were also exposed.

Jordan, citing court documents, wrote that the information was stored on Amazon Web Services, where alleged hacker Paige Thompson worked until 2016.