Lawsuit Accuses DOJ Of Secretly Surveilling Congressional Staff Investigating It

A group dedicated to independent oversight of government and corporate wrongdoing is suing the Department of Justice for allegedly surveilling various congressional staff members who were actively engaged in oversight of the DOJ.

Empower Oversight filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to compel compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.

“These records will show the lengths to which DOJ went starting in 2016 to secretly surveil various congressional staff members (of both political parties) who were actively engaged in oversight of DOJ pursuant to their constitutional authorities,” the lawsuit states. “That surveillance is undisputed, as various third-party technology companies have alerted current and former congressional staff members that the companies received subpoenas for the staffers’ communications records, along with non-disclosure orders (NDOs) that prevented the companies from notifying the staff members.”

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The lawsuit substantiated its argument by noting:

On October 19, 2023, Empower Oversight’s founder, Jason Foster, received a notification that DOJ had served a subpoena on Google in 2017 for records of a Google email address and two Google Voice telephone numbers connected to Mr. Foster’s family’s telephones and his official work phone at the U.S. Senate. At the time, in 2017, Mr. Foster was Chief Investigative Counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and he was responsible for directing congressional oversight investigations into waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct at DOJ.  Although Google received this subpoena in 2017, it was unable to notify Mr. Foster about the subpoenas until 2023, because DOJ also sought and received several NDOs related to the subpoena.

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The lawsuit continued:

After receiving the notice from Google, Mr. Foster learned that several of the other accounts listed in the subpoena belonged to other staffers, both Republicans and Democrats, for U.S. House and Senate committees also engaged in oversight of DOJ. Despite the obvious and serious separation-of-powers issues raised by such subpoenas, DOJ did not provide any of this background to Google when it served the subpoena.