A whistleblower group is suing the Department of Justice over its efforts to “secretly surveil” congressional staff conducting oversight on the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation.
Empower Oversight Whistleblowers and Research says in a civil suit filed Tuesday that the DOJ has repeatedly stonewalled records requests involving the “undisputed” surveillance.
Its suit seeks to force the Justice Department to hand over records related to the alleged unconstitutional surveillance after five earlier Freedom of Information Act requests between October 2023 and June 2024 for the documents were ignored.
“These records will show the lengths to which DOJ went starting in 2016 to secretly surveil various congressional staff members (of both political parties) who were actively engaged in oversight of DOJ pursuant to their constitutional authorities,” states the complaint submitted to the DC federal district court.
“That surveillance is undisputed, as various third-party technology companies have alerted current and former congressional staff members that the companies received subpoenas for the staffers’ communications records, along with non-disclosure orders (NDOs) that prevented the companies from notifying the staff members,” the suit says.
Empower’s founder, Jason Foster, discovered in October that he was one of those congressional staff members surveilled by the Justice Department while serving as Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley’s chief investigative counsel.
“Last fall, @Google told me @TheJusticeDept forced it to secretly turn over my comms records in 2017,” Foster posted on X, referencing a Sept. 12 subpoena that year for his private cell phone and email communications.
At the time, Grassley was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and probing the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which looked into alleged links between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.
Grassley and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) demanded answers from Attorney General Merrick Garland in an October 2023 letter about the alleged violation of the separation of powers.
“The DOJ must be taken to the woodshed for its illegal and unacceptable surveillance of the Legislative branch, which they initiated because Congressional staff were unraveling the Deep State’s own Russiagate lies and embarrassing powerful bureaucrats,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told The Post.
“In 5 months we will have a president who respects the Constitution and the separation of powers it guarantees, but until then, this lawsuit is a vital step in bringing accountability to the corrupt,” Lee said in a statement.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, in his review of Crossfire Hurricane, also found FBI abuses related to warrants submitted to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the peddling of the now-infamous Steele dossier.
Foster confirmed the DOJ and FBI also “targeted a dozen or so other Capitol Hill attorneys’ personal accounts — from both political parties” who were looking into the FBI misconduct that included Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses as well.
Both federal law-enforcement agencies later imposed non-disclosure orders for six years on Google and other big tech giants such as Apple and Verizon that had been subpoenaed for congressional staff communications.
Those NDOs were enforced even after ex-Senate Intelligence Committee staffer James Wolfe was convicted for lying to the FBI about his communications with a then-BuzzFeed reporter about Page’s contacts with Russians.
Empower Oversight has already initiated another civil suit to unseal all the DOJ’s subpoenas filed to obtain the private communications of congressional staff.
Those subpoenas may have ensnared the communications of then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and some of his top aides, including Robert Hur, who later served as Maryland US attorney and special counsel in the classified documents probe of President Biden, Edward O’Callaghan and Sarah Isgur, according to Tuesday’s complaint.
Horowitz’s office has been conducting its own review into whether the DOJ’s conduct during the investigations was “based upon improper considerations.”
That review “remains ongoing,” a spokeswoman for the DOJ OIG’s office told The Post on Tuesday.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a Post request for comment.
