This week, I’m reporting a disturbing story that implies government officials abusing their power, crossing an important Constitutional line that’s supposed to ensure the separation of powers. It surrounds the Department of Justice and FBI spying on the very people investigating the agencies’ misconduct.
When Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, and other members of Congress investigate insider claims about government wrongdoing, it’s staffers like attorney Jason Foster who are doing much of the hard work behind the scenes.
Some blowing the whistle to Congress are telling on the FBI and Department of Justice.
I asked him if whistleblowers reaching out to Grassley have ruffled a lot of feathers.
“Oh, absolutely. Always,” he said.
Foster left his job as Grassley’s chief investigative attorney in October 2018 and started his own watchdog group, Empower Oversight.
Then last year, he got a shocking notification. He and other Capitol Hill staffers, Democrats and Republicans, had been secretly spied on in 2017 by the very government agencies they were investigating.
“They were absolutely surveilling our communications,” he said.
Foster said he learned about it in an email he received from Google.
“It said, ‘This is to notify you that in 2017, we complied with compulsory process and provided your information from your Google voice telephone number and your Google email to the department. We complied with the subpoena.'”
The time period of the spying was after Donald Trump first took office. Grassley and Foster were among those officially investigating abuses by the DOJ and FBI related to their targeting of Trump in a false Russia collusion narrative.
“I think it’s a violation of the separation of powers, because the Senate and the House should have had an opportunity, before their staff’s attorneys’ information is collected, to raise any objections to that… And certainly whistleblower communications are absolutely going to be chilled. They’re going to be less likely to speak to Congress if they believe that the fact that they talk to Congress will be immediately unmasked and disclosed to the people back at the agency about whom they’re trying to disclose wrongdoing.”
The FBI and DOJ wouldn’t answer our specific questions, but the DOJ told us that it has tightened up its processes: “In 2021, following reports that the Department had sought information related to Members of Congress and congressional staff back in 2017, the Department took several significant steps to review and enhance its relevant policies and procedures.”
The FBI and DOJ also justified their spying by saying it was to find the congressional staffer who leaked classified information to the media. The leaked classified material they were so worried about implicated them — the agencies — in wrongdoing. It proved the FBI lied on a court application to get a wiretap on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.
Grassley is now looking into the government spying on Foster and other staffers. In a statement, Grassley called the surveillance “wholly unacceptable” and said it “offends fundamental separation of powers principles as well as Congress’s constitutional authority to conduct oversight…These revelations strongly suggest that the Justice Department weaponized its law-enforcement authority to spy on the entities seeking to hold it accountable.”
According to Foster, “The attorneys for your elected representatives in Congress who were supposed to hold DOJ and the FBI accountable for potential abuses were targeted by those organizations… None of the safeguards that are supposedly there were triggered. And so Congress didn’t have an opportunity to object. And this is one branch of government collecting communications data on the other branch of government that’s supposed to be doing oversight.”
Foster filed a lawsuit to unveil ongoing secrecy, like what exactly the DOJ said to convince a court to authorize the surveillance on Capitol Hill staffers. He lost the case but plans to appeal.
“Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson” airs at 10 a.m. Sunday, WJLA (Channel 7) and WBFF (Channel 45).
