PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - An Oregon Department of Justice investigator who was fired after conducting digital surveillance on the state’s top civil rights lawyer has sued the agency and the state attorney general, contending he was let go in an act of retaliation.
James Williams said in the federal lawsuit filed Tuesday in Eugene that he was doing his job when he came across what he perceived to be anti-police postings on the Twitter account of Erious Johnson Jr., the attorney in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
The lawsuit does not specify what tweets Williams found objectionable.
An attorney hired in late 2015 to do an independent investigation of the surveillance said Johnson had shared cartoons and commentary about the police killings of black Americans.
Justice Department officials have yet to respond to the Williams lawsuit.
Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum placed Williams on leave in late 2015, saying she was appalled that Johnson had been targeted for surveillance. Williams was fired last August.
Williams said he had been commended previously for his investigative work on the social media postings of a patriot group.
With that background, the lawsuit states, he was ordered in September 2015 to test new software to search for potential anti-government threats, and one Twitter hashtag he checked was #BlackLivesMatter.
Williams said he asked supervisors whether it was appropriate for a DOJ employee such as Johnson to post content that may be anti-police and was told to write a memo about what he discovered.
Williams also attended a mandatory meeting called by the DOJ’s human resources department.
“Plaintiffs and his colleagues were instructed that if they found offensive postings by other employees that they should notify a supervisor,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit claims Williams was fired in an act of whistleblower retaliation and his due process rights were violated. He wants his job back along with back pay and damages for mental anguish, humiliation and a loss of enjoyment in life.
It’s the second federal lawsuit tied to the hashtag scandal.
Johnson, who is black, sued Williams, Rosenblum and others in the department in October, saying his civil rights were violated in an act of racial profiling.
Johnson’s lawsuit said the Twitter feed was examined after Williams noticed a logo connected with the hip-hop group Public Enemy. The lawsuit says the logo depicts a black man in silhouette in the crosshairs of a gun, but Williams mistook the man for a police officer and wrote to his supervisor that Johnson could be a threat.
In a response filed Wednesday to Johnson’s lawsuit, Rosenblum and Deputy Attorney General Frederick Boss said that Boss never approved any recommendation that Williams provide a threat assessment about Johnson.
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