The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday for details about the Justice Department‘s attempts to spy on members of Congress and congressional staff.
In a letter to Mr. Garland, Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican and House Judiciary Committee chairman, said Justice had not complied with the panel’s earlier requests for info on these makes an attempt and different surveillance of Republican officers.
“It cannot independently determine whether the DOJ sought to alleviate the heightened separation-of-powers sensitivities involved or whether the DOJ first sought the information through other means before resorting to legal process,” Mr. Jordan wrote to Mr. Garland.
“The Committee also has concerns that aspects of the DOJ‘s investigation may have been a pretext to justify piercing the Legislative Branch’s deliberative process and improperly access data from Members and staff involved in conducting oversight of the Department,” he wrote.
The Justice Department declined to remark.
On Oct. 19, Google knowledgeable the previous chief investigative counsel to Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, that the Justice Department had subpoenaed Google in 2017 to get the staffer’s private cellphone data and emails.
The request for the staffer’s private cellphone data and emails got here whereas the Senate Judiciary Committee, then chaired by Mr. Grassley, was investigating the Department’s dealing with of the Christopher Steele file.
That now-debunked 2016 memo, paid for by Democratic political campaigns, contained salacious and unverified allegations tying Donald Trump to Russia.
A wiretapped cellphone name between incoming Trump nationwide safety adviser Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak surfaced through the investigation of Mr. Trump for purported collusion with Russian efforts to intervene with the 2016 presidential election. This was thought of a leak of categorised info.
The Senate Judiciary Committee had demanded solutions from the Justice Department concerning the Flynn investigation and the phone-call leak, which was the categorised info.
On Oct. 31, Mr. Jordan launched an inquiry into the matter and despatched letters to the chief govt officers of Alphabet, Apple, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon and to Mr. Garland saying the investigation and demanding paperwork and supplies associated to the problem.
The Judiciary Committee launched its probe following experiences in September that a number of present and former congressional staffers discovered the Justice Department subpoenaed their private cellphone and electronic mail data in 2017, probably as a part of a leak probe.
The targets included Republican and Democratic House and Senate staffers.
Google alerted Jason Foster, Mr. Grassley’s former chief investigative counsel on the Judiciary Committee, that the DOJ wished and obtained his private data.
In a later Freedom of Information Act request to the DOJ, Mr. Foster’s nonprofit group, Empower Oversight, described the Justice Department‘s search vary.
“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 Dec. 1, 2016 to May 1, 2017,” says the letter, which was written by Empower Oversight President Tristan Leavitt.
The letter additionally mentions that different attorneys have publicly referenced receiving comparable notices from the DOJ, together with Kash Patel, a former staffer with the House intelligence committee.
The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General says on its web site that it’s “reviewing the DOJ’s use of subpoenas and other legal authorities to obtain communication records of Members of Congress and affiliated persons, and the news media in connection with recent investigations of alleged unauthorized disclosures of information to the media.”
