Seeking to Investigate Leaks, Trump Justice Department Secretly Obtained Phone and Text Records of 43 Congressional Staffers and 2 Members of Congress
A new report by the Department of Justice’s internal watchdog has revealed that the Trump Justice Department secretly obtained phone and text message logs of 43 congressional staffers and 2 members of Congress in 2017 and 2018 as part of a broader probe into leaks of classified information. The probe was broader than previously known, and the records were seized from third-party providers, including Apple, using subpoenas and gag orders.
The report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the DOJ did not act with political motives, but failed to take sufficient account of constitutional separation of powers by seizing communications records of staffers and lawmakers, and making them subjects of a criminal investigation, simply because they had lawful access to state secrets through their jobs.
The seizures of the records had previously been reported, but the IG report reveals new details about the scope of the effort. The report also found that the DOJ violated its own policies in the way it secretly obtained phone and text records from reporters in the same leak investigations, which related to the FBI’s probe of suspected Trump campaign coordination with Russia.
The seizures of the records from reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN had previously been reported, and the Biden Justice Department has stiffened its guidelines on the issue. The report noted that the failures occurred only a few years after the department had overhauled its procedures for handling sensitive information.