A former congressional aide has confirmed Deep State operatives at the Department of Justice hid their surveillance of Congress’ operations for years.
Jason Foster, now head of the Empower Oversight whistleblower center, has confirmed to Just the News that lawyers for Google have – now – given him documentation confirming that the DOJ insisted, and a federal magistrate agreed, for five consecutive years to conceal the DOJ’s actions from him.
He was involved because it was his data, information about his personal phone calls and emails, that the DOJ had obtained.
Back in 2017 he was working for U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, as his chief investigative counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Ordinarily, he would have been notified about the DOJ’s seizure of his records after one year.
“But because the DOJ sought court approval ex parte to keep its surveillance secret, he wasn’t alerted until earlier this fall, six years after the initial subpoena,” the report explained.
Ex parte is a court term that means one party, in this case the DOJ, is demanding action by a judge without letting the other party involved, even know about the request. Normally, ex parte communications are banned, and can even result in court sanctions.
The DOJ long has been considered to be a component of the “Deep State,” those permanent federal bureaucrats who make many of the decisions of the government, often in a partisan way. It was the DOJ that participated in the now-debunked “Russia collusion” lies that Democrats made up against President Donald Trump in 2016. The FBI, one component of the DOJ, was active in election interference in 2020 when agents warned publications to suppress the Biden family scandals revealed in Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop because it was “Russian disinformation,” when they knew at the time they were real.
WND has reported how the DOJ “illegally surveilled” Foster and Kash Patel, as the top GOP congressional lawyers investigated “Crossfire Hurricane,” the department’s codename for the Russian collusion probe.
Tejpal Chawla, a federal prosecutor and donor to Democrat campaigns, was one of the key culprits in the surveillance of the Republican attorneys.
In 2017, congressional staffers launched an investigation into the U.S. attorney’s office over its “Crossfire Hurricane” probe, which alleged Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election.
Chawla, an assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, went to court to get their phone records and more.
The department also spied on the phone records of Foster’s wife and potentially surveilled the phone he used for Senate business.
Just the News reported now the DOJ inspector general and the House Judiciary Committee are investigating whether that spying violated the U.S. Constitution.
Patel already has filed a federal lawsuit over the spying.
“They (Google) provided me the notifications that they got from the from the court signed by magistrate judges showing that for five of the six years” there were non-disclosure orders requested by DOJ and approved by the court, Foster told the “Just the News, No Noise” television show Tuesday night.
“These are orders from the court that says to Google, you’re not allowed to tell Jason or anybody else, any of his Democrat and Republican colleagues whose information. whose phone records and text records you saw, you’re not allowed to tell them that we subpoenaed those records or that you gave them up. That that was in the initial request that was for a one year timeframe. And then they renewed it every year, in September or August of every year, for the next five years,” Foster charged.
The DOJ declined Just the News’ request for comment.
The revelations have been triggering for Congress. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan has demanded America’s Big Tech companies turn over “any records showing DOJ’s effort to surveil or spy on congressional lawmakers or their staffs,” the report said.
He said the actions violated Congress’ right to conduct independent oversight of federal agencies, as well as the Constitution’s separation of powers.
via wnd
