The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday for information about the Justice Department’s attempts to spy on members of Congress and congressional staff.
In a letter to Mr. Garland, Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican and House Judiciary Committee chairman, said Justice had not complied with the panel’s previous requests for information on those attempts and other surveillance of Republican officials.
“It cannot independently determine whether the DOJ sought to alleviate the heightened separation-of-powers sensitivities involved or whether the DOJ first sought the information through other means before resorting to legal process,” Mr. Jordan wrote to Mr. Garland.
“The Committee also has concerns that aspects of the DOJ’s investigation may have been a pretext to justify piercing the Legislative Branch’s deliberative process and improperly access data from Members and staff involved in conducting oversight of the Department,” he wrote.
The Justice Department declined to comment.
On Oct. 19, Google informed the former chief investigative counsel to Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, that the Justice Department had subpoenaed Google in 2017 to get the staffer’s personal phone records and emails.
The request for the staffer’s personal phone records and emails came while the Senate Judiciary Committee, then chaired by Mr. Grassley, was investigating the Department’s handling of the Christopher Steele dossier.
That now-debunked 2016 memo, paid for by Democratic political campaigns, contained salacious and unverified allegations tying Donald Trump to Russia.
A wiretapped phone call between incoming Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak surfaced during the investigation of Mr. Trump for purported collusion with Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. This was considered a leak of classified information.
The Senate Judiciary Committee had demanded answers from the Justice Department about the Flynn investigation and the phone-call leak, which was the classified information.
On Oct. 31, Mr. Jordan launched an inquiry into the matter and sent letters to the chief executive officers of Alphabet, Apple, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon and to Mr. Garland announcing the investigation and demanding documents and materials related to the issue.
The Judiciary Committee launched its probe following reports in September that several current and former congressional staffers found out the Justice Department subpoenaed their personal phone and email records in 2017, likely as part of a leak probe.
The targets included Republican and Democratic House and Senate staffers.
Google alerted Jason Foster, Mr. Grassley’s former chief investigative counsel on the Judiciary Committee, that the DOJ wanted and received his personal records.
In a later Freedom of Information Act request to the DOJ, Mr. Foster’s nonprofit group, Empower Oversight, described the Justice Department‘s search range.
“For each of the listed telephone and email accounts, the subpoena compelled Google to release customer or subscriber information, as well as subscribers’ names, addresses, local and long-distance telephone connection records, text message logs, records of session times and durations, length of service and types of service utilized for the period from Dec. 1, 2016 to May 1, 2017,” says the letter, which was written by Empower Oversight President Tristan Leavitt.
The letter also mentions that other attorneys have publicly referenced receiving similar notices from the DOJ, including Kash Patel, a former staffer with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General says on its website that it is “reviewing the DOJ’s use of subpoenas and other legal authorities to obtain communication records of Members of Congress and affiliated persons, and the news media in connection with recent investigations of alleged unauthorized disclosures of information to the media.”
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
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