A nonprofit government watchdog wants a federal judge to pull back the curtain on illegal surveillance of Capitol Hill staffers.
A nonprofit watchdog group
filed suit on Tuesday in federal court seeking to force the Department of Justice (DOJ) to make public documents about the government’s surveillance of a bipartisan group of congressional staff investigators.
The group previously submitted five Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for DOJ records concerning the surveillance that began in 2016.
The DOJ acknowledged the requests but never provided the documents. A spokesman for the DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.
The surveillance was accomplished via government demands on Google and other internet service providers for copies of correspondence and related documents by multiple congressional investigators. The
court filing includes copies of subpoenas issued by the DOJ to Google and other service providers, seeking a broad range of records related to their accounts.
The Empower Oversight group, which filed the lawsuit, is a nonprofit foundation formed and now led by two veteran congressional investigators, Tristan Leavitt and Jason Foster. Mr. Leavitt was senior counsel for the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and deputy special counsel for the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. Mr. Foster was senior counsel for Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and investigative counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The DOJ subsequently asked federal courts to bar the internet firms from informing the staffers being surveilled. In addition to the five FOIA requests, the group opposed the DOJ motions asking the courts to impose the nondisclosure order on the internet firms.
In its Tuesday filing, the group said Mr. Foster learned in October 2023 “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,” the court filing states.
He subsequently learned that other congressional staffers from both sides of the aisle were included in the surveillance being conducted by the DOJ, according to the group.
“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,” Empower Oversight said in its
motion opposing the DOJ’s request for nondisclosure orders and to unseal the documents.
Empower Oversight claims that the surveillance of the staff investigators’ email and other communications compromised the anonymity of DOJ whistleblowers who were cooperating with Congress in exposing waste and fraud in the government.
An
amicus brief in support of the Empower Oversight motion to unseal the documents was filed on behalf of the Government Accountability Project by its legal director, Tom Devine, who argued that the continued enforcement of the nondisclosure orders would “
interfere with Congress’ ability to educate itself learn about, among other things, executive branch misconduct, in violation of the constitutional Separation of Powers.”The present suit recalls a 2014 incident in which then-CIA Director John Brennan publicly
apologized for his agency’s illegal surveillance of Senate staffers after it was confirmed in a 6,700-page
report by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Much of that report remains classified and unavailable to the public.
The CIA surveillance consisted mainly of agents conducting unauthorized searches of Senate investigative staffers’ official computers.
