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DOJ Sued For Secretly Surveilling Congressional Staff

DOJ Sued For Secret Surveillance

byAnastasia Boushee
August 28, 2024

A watchdog group has filed a lawsuit against the Biden-Harris Department of Justice (DOJ) for allegedly secretly surveilling congressional staff members who were attempting to conduct oversight of the department.

Empower Oversight, a watchdog group focused on independent oversight of government and corporate wrongdoing, filed the lawsuit against the DOJ on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The suit demands that the DOJ comply with the Freedom of Information (FOIA) Act and release documents and other information pertaining to its surveillance of congressional staff.

The group argues in the lawsuit that the surveillance of these staffers “is undisputed” thanks to documented warnings to these staffers issued by third-party technology companies.

“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.”

The founder of the group, Jason Foster, was one of the congressional staffers who was targeted by the DOJ while he was serving as Chief Investigative Counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to the lawsuit. Google was reportedly forced to secretly hand over Foster’s communications records, prompting Empower Oversight to file five FOIA requests, all of which were ignored.

“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,” the lawsuit states. “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.”

The lawsuit went on to explain that the congressional staffers secretly targeted by the DOJ, which include members of both political parties, were all working for committees that engaged in oversight of the department. Empower Oversight argued that this is a clear violation of the separation of powers.

“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,” the lawsuit continued.

Author
Anastasia Boushee
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