[The Justice Department secretly obtained phone records from two members of Congress and 43 staffers, including Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, during sweeping leak investigations during Trump’s first term. The report from the Justice Department’s inspector general raises concerns about how the department tried to root out reporters’ sources from a sprawling and bipartisan list of federal employees who had access to classified information because of their job.
Prosecutors also sought records including emails from journalists at CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times, according to the report. The report found that DOJ investigators issued a broad sweep based on who may have had access to the sensitive information that was leaked.
The inspector general’s report highlighted several issues with the investigation, including a lack of guardrails for prosecutors who want to subpoena communication records from members of Congress or their staff. The report also noted that while some protections for journalists do exist, they were not properly followed.
In the case of CNN correspondent Barbara Starr, the Trump administration secretly sought and obtained her 2017 phone and email records. It remains unclear what the Trump administration was looking for in Starr’s records.
The investigation that swept up Starr’s records involved national security information at a time Starr was reporting on US military options in North Korea, as well as Syria and Afghanistan.
The New York Times and The Washington Post also reported on the DOJ’s pursuit of their reporters’ communications. The New York Times believed the investigation was likely centered around a 2017 article about how then-FBI Director James Comey oversaw investigations related to the 2016 presidential campaign.
The Washington Post reported on the DOJ’s pursuit of three of its reporters’ records, linking it to three stories it published in 2017 about the Obama administration’s response to Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The inspector general found that prosecutors did not follow department procedure once they decided to subpoena records from journalists. The report also noted that prosecutors failed to obtain the required certification from the Director of National Intelligence and failed to obtain Barr’s approval.
The report concludes that the effort to obtain records was likely a result of a failure to follow department procedure, and that the department did not properly follow its own rules and guidelines.
An apparent leak investigation years ago that swept up Patel’s Google account information fueled some of his anger toward the Justice Department and FBI in recent years. Patel has since sued Trump’s prior top DOJ and FBI appointees, including Director Christopher Wray, for unfairly obtaining his data in 2017.
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