WASHINGTON – Empower Oversight’s Chairman and Founder, Jason Foster, will be featured on Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson during her Dec. 8 show regarding the Justice Department secretly collecting his phone and email records when he led the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Oversight and Investigations unit for then-Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA). The surveillance raises serious questions related to whistleblower protection and the constitutional separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government.
A report from the Justice Department’s Inspector General related to the controversy is due to be released next week, according to congressional sources.
The controversial DOJ subpoenas remained hidden for years due to gag orders sought by the D.C. U.S. Attorneys Office under both presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The subpoenas targeted both Republican and Democrat attorneys on Capitol Hill at the time, including Foster and Kash Patel. President-elect Trump recently announced he intends to nominate Patel as FBI Director.
Foster will discuss with Attkisson Empower Oversight’s lawsuit to unseal documents relating to the Justice Department’s subpoenas for activity logs of the personal phone and email accounts of members of Congress and a dozen or more attorneys for congressional committees. Each year for six years, DOJ secretly obtained gag orders from the court to prevent Google—the initial recipient of the subpoena for the congressional communications logs—from notifying its Legislative Branch customers that it had provided their records to the Executive Branch.
“We’ll hear the outrageous story of a congressional staffer who discovered he was spied on by the very government agency he was investigating for abuse. Did the Department of Justice cross an important constitutional line that is supposed to ensure separation of powers?” Attkisson said in the preview of the story to air this weekend.
Empower Oversight has sued the Department of Justice and in an initial ruling the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Chief Judge James E. Boasberg agreed that two of DOJ’s applications for nondisclosure orders (“NDOs” or “gag orders”) should be unsealed in part. However, after privately reviewing all of DOJ’s applications and renewals that forced Google to keep the subpoenas secret for six years, Boasberg allowed DOJ to keep the majority of them secret without explaining why. He also allowed DOJ to entirely redact the government’s factual claims in the applications that supposedly justified the need for secrecy, revealing in the two documents partially unsealed only a generic discussion of the legal standards that govern NDOs.
In addition to this lawsuit and initial ruling, which Empower Oversight has appealed, there are several other efforts to obtain transparency in this serious separation of powers issue: a separate FOIA suit by Empower Oversight; a congressional subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee; an oversight letter from senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Chuck Grassley; and the upcoming public report likely to be released the week of Dec. 9 by the Justice Department Inspector General (“Review of the Department of Justice’s Use of Subpoenas and Other Legal Authorities to Obtain Communication Records of Members of Congress and Affiliated Persons, and the News Media”).
People can find out how to watch the show by clicking here.
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