As President Donald J. Trump hunted for people inside the government who were divulging details of an investigation into whether his 2016 election campaign colluded with Russia, the Justice Department turned to a covert tactic.
Beginning in 2017, department officials secretly collected the phone and email records of roughly a dozen people connected to Congress, including lawmakers and aides who routinely deal with anonymous whistle-blowers, in an effort to see who might be coming forward with confidential information.
Some of the aides, from both political parties, learned only recently that their communications were collected, because the government for years hid the existence of the subpoenas with nondisclosure orders.
Now, whistle-blower advocacy groups are trying to pry more information out of the Justice Department, through court filings and public records requests, in the hopes of shaming the agency into ending the practice of secretly collecting congressional communications records…
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Tristan Leavitt, the president of Empower Oversight, criticized the government’s insistence that even its arguments against releasing the documents be kept secret.
“The government’s continued secrecy in a closed investigation that very well could cross lines of separation of powers confounds anyone we have spoken with,” Mr. Leavitt said.
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