When the Justice Department Spied on Congress How officials snooped on staffers investigating Justice’s press leaks and investigations.
The Justice Department’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation is the fiasco that keeps on giving, and look no further than this week’s revelations of abuse of power. The latest news is that Justice snooped on the Congressional investigators who dared to conduct oversight of its snooping on the 2016 Trump campaign.
Numerous current and former congressional staffers have learned that Justice subpoenaed their personal phone and email records in 2017, likely under the pretext of a leak investigation. The targets included Republican and Democratic staffers in the Senate and House.
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They join staffers and Members of the House Intelligence Committee, who over the past two years said they were notified by Google or
that Justice seized their data. By our count, executive-branch prosecutors have now been caught fishing through the records of more than a dozen employees of the congressional branch. DOJ’s inspector general is probing the matter.
Last week Google notified Jason Foster, Sen. Chuck Grassley’s former chief investigative counsel on the Judiciary Committee, that Justice sought and received Mr. Foster’s personal records. In a subsequent Freedom of Information Act request to Justice, Mr. Foster’s nonprofit, Empower Oversight, lays out the scope of Justice’s search.
The FOIA letter to Justice says Google received a federal subpoena on Sept. 12, 2017, for records related to a Foster family telephone number, as well as other accounts that are redacted but that Empower Oversight believes belonged to other staffers.
“For each of the listed telephone and email accounts, the subpoena compelled Google to release customer or subscriber information, as well as subscribers’ names, addresses, local and long distance telephone connection records, text message logs, records of session times and durations, length of service and types of service utilized for the period from December 1, 2016 to May 1, 2017,” says the letter. DOJ wanted to know Mr. Foster’s sources and methods.
Recall what was going on at that time. The Washington Post in 2017 reported on a wiretapped phone call between incoming Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak—an egregious leak of classified information. The Senate Judiciary Committee sought answers from DOJ about the Flynn probe and the leak.
DOJ provided few answers to Congress, though in an effort to justify its snooping it revealed that it also had a surveillance warrant against former Trump aide Carter Page. Details of that classified Page warrant soon leaked to the press, via stories that sought to bolster the FBI’s narrative of Trump-Russia collusion.
At the time DOJ was essentially run by career officials, after then Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from Trump-Russia questions, while former FBI Director James Comey had been fired that May.
Was DOJ conducting an investigation into the Flynn and Page classified leaks? The subpoena’s dates for Mr. Foster’s records match up. But then why subpoena Congress? Only executive-branch officials would have initially had details of the Flynn conversation.
As the FOIA letter notes, the subpoena raises “the question of whether the Department also subpoenaed the personal phone and email records of every Executive Branch official who had access to the same information. If not, then the entire exercise looks more like a pretext to gather intelligence on those conducting oversight of the Department rather than a legitimate classified leak inquiry.”
The Foster subpoena sought a family phone number, one that Empower notes was “actually used by his wife, who never communicated with the media on that phone number or any other.” Mr. Foster was an attorney advising a congressional committee conducting oversight. The subpoenas ignored attorney-client privilege, the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause that protects Members in their official duties, and the separation of powers.
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All of this is further evidence of how officials at the Justice Department lost their bearings over Donald Trump and in the process exceeded their proper authority. Congress deserves a full explanation of who authorized these subpoenas, why they were issued, and what protections will guarantee it won’t happen again.
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