Can you imagine the danger to our republic if the Executive Branch could secretly, for months on end, and without any clear and compelling justification, surveil the very people in Congress conducting oversight of those agencies?
That chilling constitutional nightmare transpired. And we’re only getting the details about the separation-of-powers-eviscerating, civil liberties-undermining, and transparency-imperiling activity seven years after it started.
The revelations come in a recently released Justice Department Inspector General report. Like much of this corrupt activity, the story begins with Russiagate. In the spring and summer of 2017, the first year of the Trump presidency, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post published articles containing classified information concerning Trump and Russia.
Among the unauthorized disclosures to emerge was that a FISA warrant had been issued to surveil Trump’s foreign policy adviser Carter Page. The dubious warrants would be renewed four times.
Page was framed as a Russian agent through authorities’ omission of critical exculpatory information and reliance on the dodgy Steele dossier that federal investigators could never corroborate. An official would later be prosecuted for doctoring information about Page used to justify FISA warrant renewal.
Page’s reputation was destroyed, and his rights violated, all as part of a fishing expedition into Trump world that had the added benefit from the perspective of the Deep State of fueling the narrative that the president too was a Russian agent. Indeed, the revelations added smoke to the phony Trump-Russia collusion fire that would consume the first two years of his administration.
Federal authorities went on a mole hunt for the Russiagate leaker. Between 2017 and 2018, prosecutors issued subpoenas for non-content records for phone numbers and email addresses covering two members of Congress and 43 staffers — Democrats and Republicans alike — on grounds they may have accessed the classified information before it wound up in the papers.
The justification in most cases was simply “the close proximity in time between that access and the subsequent publication of the news articles,” the IG found.
The records included information like text message logs, email recipient addresses, and call detail records indicating who initiated communications, with which numbers, dates, times, durations, etc. The records would have provided a map to the professional and personal lives of those surveilled.
In myriad instances the feds sought non-disclosure orders from courts too. The NDOs prevented communications companies from apprising the congressmen and staffers that their records had been subpoenaed. In other words, they ensured the surveilled overseers of those doing the surveilling were kept in the dark.
The DOJ obtained 40 NDOs, approximately 30 of which were renewed at least once, and most of which were repeatedly renewed — some extending up to four years.
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