Oct. 22--Bank of America executives told government officials last December they were considering backing out of their Merrill Lynch deal, even though the bank's own top lawyer had told them they didn't have grounds, a congressional investigation has learned.

The revelation is likely to fuel accusations that the Charlotte bank threatened to abandon the purchase only because it wanted to win a bailout from government officials worried about a tottering financial system. The purchase ultimately closed Jan. 1 and the bank received $20 billion in loans weeks later.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, along with other authorities, has been probing the circumstances of the deal for months. Last week, Bank of America provided about 1,000 pages of documents that shed new light on the bank's internal communications and interaction with its outside lawyers.

Documents obtained by the Observer on Tuesday evening show that the bank was worried about rising losses at Merrill Lynch in November, before shareholders voted to approve the deal Dec. 5. Later in December, two directors appeared to express concerns about rising losses at Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. Added director Chad Gifford in an e-mail: "it's the way we approved acquisitions that tick me off the most!!!"

The disclosure of the documents came as the committee postponed a hearing scheduled for Thursday that was to include testimony from Gifford, Director Thomas May and former general counsel Tim Mayopoulos. The committee, led by New York Democrat Edolphus Towns, now wants to interview both directors as well as consumer banking executive Brian Moynihan, who also played a role in the bank's talks with the government.

Declining to discuss specific documents, Bank of America spokesman Larry Di Rita said, "Selective review of individual documents does not change the facts: The full record of these documents reveals business people and their legal advisers dealing with complex issues in unprecedented times to make decisions based on the best information available."

Committee sources said the panel's investigators on Monday interviewed Mayopoulos, the former general counsel who abruptly left the bank Dec. 10 for undisclosed reasons. He was briefly replaced by Moynihan, who is seen as a possible successor to departing chief executive Ken Lewis.

In the interview with investigators, Mayopoulos said he met with chief financial officer Joe Price and then strategy executive Greg Curl on Dec. 1, four days before the shareholder vote, the sources said.