Independent organization Empower Oversight filed a lawsuit to force the release of records requested under the Freedom of Information Act that would reveal efforts from the Department of Justice to surveil congressional staff members.
According to the organization, the DOJ conducted surveillance on staff members who were involved in oversight of the agency.
“The requested records are likely to show a startling failure by DOJ to respect the long-established separation of powers in the United States Constitution,” the filing reads. “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.”
“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,” it continues.
“Considering the significant constitutional issues posed by such brazen retaliation against staff members who were performing oversight of DOJ, the public has a deep interest in learning more about these abuses,” the filing explains.
In 2023, Empower Oversight’s founder, Jason Foster, who also served as the Chief Investigative Counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, received a notice from Google that the DOJ had “subpoenaed Google in 2017 for extensive records associated with his Google email address and two Google Voice telephone numbers,” Empower Oversight wrote in a release.
“Empower Oversight’s further inquiries confirmed that multiple Republican and Democratic members of Congress and attorneys for congressional oversight committees also had their records subpoenaed, which DOJ had kept secret for six years through a series of gag orders it obtained in D.C. federal court to stop providers like Google from informing their customers,” the group said.
