IG finds Justice Department spied on Patel and other congressional staffer without telling courts
By: Steven Richards
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Justice Department spied on two House members and several congressional staffers in a leak investigation without telling the courts, the agency's inspector general found in a sweeping investigation released Tuesday.
As a result, the department obtained phone records from the two members of Congress and 43 staff members including President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, who worked as a staffer on the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee at the time.
The department initiated the probe to investigate leaks to the media of FBI classified information as part of the now-discredited Trump-Russia probe which had recently been shared with Congress.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the Justice Department, in filings with the court, did not reference "the fact that they related to requests for records of Members of Congress or congressional staffers," despite implicating constitutional separation of powers between two government branches.
You can read the report below:
https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2024-12/IG%20report%20on%20leak%20investigation.pdf
Patel, who is poised to become the new director of the FBI if confirmed, previously sued former Trump Justice Department officials and FBI Director Christopher Wray, accusing them of violating his Fourth Amendment right to protection from unreasonable searches and seizures when they tried to obtain Patel's personal records, Just the News previously reported.
Patel said he was completely unaware of the subpoena until December 2022, when Google notified him about it.
Another former staffer, Jason Foster, previously told Just the News that he confirmed that the government successfully asked a federal court to hide its spying on Congress for five consecutive years.
Foster is now the head of the Empower Oversight whistleblower center. In 2017 at the time of the secret surveillance, he was the chief investigative counsel for Sen. Chuck Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The seizure of his personal data occurred in 2017 while he worked for the Senate, and ordinarily under the original court order, Foster would have been notified a year later. But because the DOJ sought court approval ex parte to keep its surveillance secret, he wasn't alerted until earlier this fall, six years after the initial subpoena.
Grassley on Tuesday claimed that the investigation was an example of the Justice Department acting in "bad faith," and urged the incoming Trump administration to fix the ongoing problem.
"It's plain to see DOJ overstepped its authority here," Grassley said in a statement. "The Justice Department ought to learn from its mistakes and accept accountability, because Congress won't accept any less. The incoming Trump administration must take steps to ensure these problems ... are fixed."
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So the democrats are STILL spying on opposition...and getting caught. One would think they would learn.
Do you feel that the DOJ should NOT be used in politics?
Why are you claiming this was the Democrats? This was the Trump administration trying to identify leakers to the press in 2017, 2018, and 2020.
Biden changed DOJ procedures in order to stop the practice not long after taking office in 2021.
Your ire is misplaced.
Who is running the DOJ? Democrats.
We see how that worked.
This happened during the Trump administration. They were trying to figure out who was talking to the press.
The article you posted is about the Trump DOJ secretly subpoenaing private records on people without court notification, and with NDOs issued to the recipients of the subpoenas, so that the people being investigated wouldn't know.
Trump did that, not the Democrats. The Democrats stopped it by changing DOJ procedures after the story first came to light in 2021.
It’s not even a surprise. Everybody involved needs to be fired, at the least.
I would say I'm shocked. But after the last four years of liberal Democrat rule, nothing much surprises me anymore.
Last 4 years nothing. This goes back to Obama and possibly earlier.
Very true.
The question remains, why were certain individuals investigated?
Why does it always seem to be republicans are the ones being spied on?
[✘] the guy Trump wants to run the FBI. Please make sense of that for me.
[✘]
At the time this all happened 2017-2020 Trump was President and it was his Justice Department investigating Congressional leaks...