Can you picture the danger to our state if the Executive Branch was covertly, for months at a time, and without any compelling reason to do so?
That chilling legal headache transpired. And we’re just getting the information about the separation-of-powers-eviscerating, legal liberties-undermining, and transparency-imperiling engagement seven decades after it started.
A recent Justice Department Inspector General document contains the disclosures. Like much of this dishonest action, the history begins with Russiagate. CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post published papers that contained classified info about Trump and Russia in the spring and summer of 2017.
A FISA subpoena had been issued to monitor Trump’s foreign policy adviser Carter Page, among the illicit statements that came out. The subpoenas ‘ validity may be renewed four days.
Through the reliance on the sketchy Steele dossier and the omission of important exculpatory information that federal investigators could not corroborate, Page was falsely identified as a Russian agent. An official would eventually be tried for fabricating data that was used to support the FISA permit renewal.
Page’s standing was ruined as a result of a fishing trip into Trump’s world, which also had the added benefit of bolstering the claim that the leader was a Russian representative as well. However, the revelations added fumes to the fraudulent Trump-Russia cooperation fire that would take the first two years of his management.
Federal officials conducted a covert search for the Russiagate motif. On the grounds that they may have accessed the defined data before it ended up in the journals, lawyers issued warrants for non-content data for phone numbers and email addresses for two members of Congress and 43 employees, Democrats and Republicans, between 2017 and 2018.
The IG found that” the close vicinity in time between that exposure and the following release of the media content” was the most common explanation.
The records included data like text message logs, internet receiver addresses, and telephone detail records indicating who initiated communications, with which numbers, dates, times, durations, etc. The surveillance would include provided a chart of the people’s professional and personal lives.
In a large number of cases, the authorities have also requested non-disclosure requests from courts. Communications firms were prevented from informing representatives and employees that their records had been censored by the NDOs. In other words, they made sure that the surveiling overlords who conducted the surveillance were kept in the dark.
The DOJ was given 40 NDOs, about 30 of which were renewed at least once, and the majority of them were frequently renewed, some lasting up to four years.
One of those targeted was a then-top employee for Senate Judiciary Ranking Committee member Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, Jason Foster. In a RealClearPolitics account of his Empower Oversight volunteer, I originally detailed his efforts to uncover the truth about the subpoena campaign. The Senate Judiciary Committee was probing the Trump-Russia research.
The House Intelligence Committee was also led by former California Republican Congressman Devin Nunes. One of his best authorities, Kash Patel, who is now Trump’s get to direct the FBI in his next name, even had his information subpoenaed. Patel’s assistance in writing the so-called” Nunes Memo” and much of the other corruption committed by the Russiagate investigators would help expose the feds ‘ violations of the Carter Page FISA warrants. Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein reportedly threatened to subpoena Patel’s communications, as well as those of his colleagues, in January 2018, weeks prior to the release of the memo, over their vigorous investigating of the investigators.
Little did Patel realize that those communications records were already being gathered under subpoena requests involving data that date back as early as December 1, 2016, pausing to consider that they were being requested. Foster and Patel weren’t aware that their records had been subpoenaed until the Biden years, when the communications firms were permitted to make the secret subpoenas public.
To make matters even more absurd, the DOJ’s NDO applications to the courts did not specify whether those who were kept in the dark about their subpoenaed records were members of Congress or staffers. The NDOs also “relied on general assertions about the need for non-disclosure rather than on case-specific justifications. According to the IG, department policy at the time did not require including information in applications about whose records are in dispute. ” Prosecutors making boilerplate statements in NDO applications” is permitted by DOJ policy and is still.
When news stories about what had transpired broke out during the Biden years, DOJ issued a new congressional investigations policy ostensibly requiring more scrutiny and higher-level approvals for subpoenas and NDOs, but still not the attorney general or deputy attorney general’s approval, not that any such procedures would have necessarily prevented such misconduct. Only after reviewing the IG report in September of this year did DOJ even draft regulations requiring that prosecutors make disclosures to the court when an NDO involves a staffer or congressional office.
Another important finding from the IG report is that members of the media are actually more likely than members of the legislative branch to subpoena communications records. Unlike the DOJ’s News Media Policy, the Congressional Investigations Policy contains no “exhaustion requirement”. Before requesting a subpoena, prosecutionsmen must not attempt to “identify the sources of the unauthorized disclosures” using” all other reasonable means of identifying the sources of the unauthorized disclosures.” Only then, in the case of news media, must the feds request” Attorney General authorization”.
Remarkably, even after modifying its Congressional Investigations Policy, according to the IG, it is not clear that illegal leaks are subject to the policy. The first section of the DOJ’s Justice Manual’s chapter,” Protection of Government Integrity,” states that the chapter deals with crimes “including bribery of public officials and accepting a gratuity, election crimes, and other related offenses.” Unauthorized disclosures do not appear on the list.
So why couldn’t this exact episode play out again?
The IG came to the conclusion that attempts like these could” chill Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch” and at least give the impression of “unwanted interference” by that branch “in legitimate oversight activity” even though it could not find “retaliatory or political motivation” for the issuance of the subpoenas.
One does not need to think long about how a dishonest or corrupt national security apparatus could spy on political foes for nefarious purposes using the pretext of an illegal leak. The mere possibility that could happen, as the IG suggests, is corrosive to our system. And it’s worth noting that in the case at hand, no leaker was ever charged.
Another ominous instance of an FBI and DOJ that have abused their powers in chilling ways is revealed in the IG report.
Attorney General-designate Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, a man who has exposed that abuse and has allegedly been a victim of it, will have their work cut out for them in reforming a national security and law enforcement apparatus that all too frequently has undermined Americans ‘ rights rather than defending them.
Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten. substack .com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.