Free Republic

A whistleblower organization has initiated a court action to force the Department of Justice to disclose why it spied on congressional staff, setting up a landmark legal battle on an issue that has rankled both Republicans and Democrats.Last fall, several current and former congressional oversight staff were belatedly informed that the Justice Department seized phone and email records in 2017 in an internal investigation, raising concerns about separation of powers between two branches of government.Jason Foster, who is now the founder and chair of Empower Oversight, the group which sued in court this week to unseal the court documents in...

The Department of Justice (DOJ) obtained private communications and other personal records of multiple Republican House and Senate staffers who were investigating the department’s role in the origins of the Russia collusion hoax, according to former senior Trump administration official Kash Patel. A recently-revealed subpoena shows that the DOJ sought the records for not only Patel when he was an investigator for then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), but also those of Jason Foster, who was at the time chief investigative counsel to then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (I-IA) and was also looking into the DOJ’s role in the hoax.

President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department regularly surveilled retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn’s financial records and transactions beginning in December 2015 and well into 2017, before, during and after when he served at the White House as President Donald Trump’s National Security Director, a former senior Treasury Department official, and veteran of the intelligence community, told the Star Newspapers. “I started seeing things that were not correct, so I did my own little investigation, because I wanted to make sure what I was seeing was correct” she said. “You never want to draw attention to something if there is...

Newly declassified documents reveal the CIA—which is supposed to be strictly limited in the types of surveillance and other secret operations it conducts on U.S. soil—routinely monitors U.S. government computer systems. That information is contained in two formerly secret letters of “congressional notification” written in 2014 by the Intelligence Community inspector general at the time, Charles McCullough. In the letters, McCullough reveals the CIA secretly intercepted and collected emails between congressional staff and the CIA’s head of whistleblowing and source protection. The collection was said to occur as part of the CIA’s “routine counterintelligence monitoring of government computer systems.” Several...

The National Security Agency "probably" collects phone records of members of Congress and their staffs, a senior Justice Department official conceded Tuesday. Deputy Attorney General James Cole buckled under questioning from multiple lawmakers during a House Judiciary Committee hearing reviewing proposals to reform the NSA's surveillance activity.

Eric Holder was asked, in a meeting about the 2014 DOJ budget, if the DOJ was monitoring phones of members of Congress. Holder refused to answer, saying that he'd be glad to answer in the appropriate forum. That clearly says that, in fact, the DOJ did monitor phones used by members of Congress. If such monitoring hadn't occurred, then Holder could have just said no. The Senator who asked the question, Kirk (R-Il), said, "The correct answer would be to say, 'No, we stayed within our lane, and I am assuring you we did not spy on members of Congress.'"...