Empower Oversight president Tristan Leavitt made the following comment after the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report entitled “DOJ Obtaining Records of Members of Congress, Congressional Staffers, and Members of the News Media using Compulsory Process.”
Empower Oversight’s Chairman and Founder, Jason Foster, was one of the targets of the Justice Department’s surveillance, 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 Justice Department subpoenaed activity logs of the personal phone and email accounts of members of Congress and more than 40 staff members for congressional committees. Each year for five 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.
In response to the report, Empower Oversight today made a Freedom of Information and Privacy Act request on behalf of Foster seeking all of the Inspector General records that reference him.
Here is Leavitt’s statement:
“The Office of Inspector General report confirms exactly what we alleged in our filing to Judge Boasberg that the Justice Department failed to inform the court that the targets of its subpoenas and gag orders were congressional attorneys. The inspector general makes clear that the department withheld key context from the court and relied on boilerplate, cut and paste language for its subpoenas and gag orders, just as we alleged in our lawsuit.
“In order to collect the communications records of a co-equal branch of government, the Justice Department should meet the highest standard of review, but here the department did not have to even show probable cause. Congress’ ability to conduct oversight and communicate confidentially with whistleblowers is at risk as long as the department can engage in these kinds of fishing expeditions.”
Empower Oversight 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.
Empower Oversight had already filed a notice of appeal seeking a more expansive unsealing, and today’s OIG report underscores why additional unsealing is necessary.
The OIG report can be found here.
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