DOJ stasi spied on Congressional staff in 2017.

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A True Bipartisan Scandal

How out of control is our surveillance state? Read about a dubious investigation that swept up communications of some of the country's most senior highest officials, and their families, in secret

Last October, current and former congressional staffers from both parties began receiving curious notices. They came from Google, which obeyed years of gag orders before finally informing House and Senate aides, legal advisors, even members of Congress themselves that their Gmail messages and Google phone records had been turned over to the Justice Department as part of a leak investigation.

Former Senate Judiciary Committee Chief Investigative Counsel Jason Foster, now at Empower Oversight, received a notice on October 19th last year, telling him the Justice Department obtained records for his Gmail account as well as “two Google Voice telephone numbers connected to his family’s telephones and his official work phone” back in 2017. At that time, he was coordinating with confidential sources and whistleblowers for the Judiciary Committee. A number of senior Congressional staffers from both parties with access to sensitive information were similarly targeted.

What’s the rub? Agencies like the Department of Justice get more latitude to demand, say, records of contacts between individuals than they do the contents of emails or phone calls. However, when dealing with things like the identities of whistleblowers, confidential sources, or journalists, the contacts are the content. Prosecutors didn’t tell Google this crucial context, that it was seeking records of its own congressional overseers. In an effort to find out if the state was similarly cavalier in what it told the court, Foster filed a motion yesterday to unseal the DOJ’s filings in the case. It described the bipartisan nature of the problem:

DOJ’s targets were not limited to Republican staff. Democrats in Congress have called for investigations into the targeting of their communications as well, which reportedly included subpoenas to Apple for information about [House Intelligence Committee] aides and their families, including one account belonging to a child.

Taken in conjunction with other recent disclosures — former Intelligence Committee chairman and Democratic heavyweight Adam Schiff and former presidential candidate Eric Swalwell received similar notices from Apple in 2021 — these cases show how easily prosecutors now can investigate their own congressional overseers and their families, gaining access to sensitive information about everyone from whistleblowers to confidential sources to the media. What are they doing with that information? Foster is trying to find out:

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As Jeff Carlson notes, the “DOJ has kept sealed their “legal rationale” for targeting the communications of congressional staff attorneys for GOP oversight committees.”

Foster notes, this DOJ subpoena appears related to the leak of the “Top Secret” FISA application used against Carter Page. The media received that leak, in March 2017, and the FBI (Washington Field Office) was investigating how the TS-SCI classified leak originated. At the same time, the DOJ (“Mueller team”), now in September 2017, had a vested interest monitoring ‘who knew what’ not only about the leak (James Wolfe and Mark Warner), but also about the motives of the special counsel coverup operation.


In the filing, Empower Oversight writes:

“At the time DOJ began collecting their communications records, Mr. Foster and his fellow colleagues on both sides of the aisle were communicating with confidential sources and whistleblowers whose willingness to share information with Congress is essential to its oversight function. The Legislative Branch has a constitutional interest in protecting the identity of those confidential sources and whistleblower just as journalists do under the First Amendment. Yet due to the secrecy demanded by DOJ, and granted ex parte by the Court, the nondisclosure orders deprived Congress of an opportunity to object at the time or even to know until years later that telecommunications providers had complied. Providers like Google, and perhaps even the Court, yielded to DOJ demands for secrecy without knowing the full context and constitutional implications of the subpoenas.” (more)

The Mark Warner and James Wolfe leak of the FISA application to media was one of the biggest untold stories of the 2017 Trump targeting and DC coverup operation. Factually, the media had the full and unredacted FISA application from March 17, 2017, throughout all of their pretense reporting, as if they didn’t know the details.

The greatest likelihood is that Mueller’s team, headed by Andrew Weissmann, wanted to keep tabs on who in Washington DC was circling the truth. The subpoena against Jason Foster and other House and Senate committee lawyers and staff would help the DOJ keep tabs on who knew the details at a very key time in the coverup operation.

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