Multiple current and former staffers who worked for congressional oversight committees recently received some odd letters in the mail from Google, Apple, and other companies. The Big Tech companies finally got around to notifying them—six years after the fact—that the Department of Justice had spied on all their emails, text messages, and phone calls during the investigation of the Russia collusion hoax. Some of the staffers already knew that they had illegally and unjustly been spied upon by the intel agencies they were supposed to be watching. For others, it was a shock and an outrage to learn.
The tech companies informed the staffers that they had turned over all their records to the Department of Justice as part of a special grand jury subpoena. The Justice Department claims, arrogantly and contemptuously, that the subpoenas were issued as part of a leak investigation during Crossfire Hurricane—the completely discredited Russia collusion hoax investigation.
The seizures of all the staffers’ data took place in September of 2017. That was just a few months after Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of handpicked Hillary Clinton cheerleaders were assigned to pretend that the completely fabricated-from-thin-air Russian dossier was real. The people whose data was illegally seized by the Justice Department worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee, then chaired by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA); and the House Intelligence Committee, which was then under the leadership of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA).
Jason Foster was an investigator working with Grassley’s committee, who helped to uncover some of the lawbreaking that the FBI did in order to spy on the Trump campaign. Foster tweeted a copy of the letter he received from Google, about all of his data that was seized by the DOJ:
I called the @USAO_DC to ask about the subpoena and the notice.
After identifying myself, I asked to speak to the Assistant U.S. Attorney responsible and provided the subpoena details.
The office put me on hold and then hung-up on me.
When I called back, I was told it was…
— Jason Foster (@JsnFostr) October 25, 2023
Foster says he called the US Attorney’s Office in DC to ask about the subpoena details and they hung up on him. This just goes to show how dangerous it was to not prosecute the Russia hoaxers after the whole thing was exposed as a political operation against President Trump. Many of the perpetrators are still on the job. Stay classy, swamp creatures!
Sen. Grassley was furious when the news broke, since it was many of his own staffers who were trying to conduct oversight of the Justice Department. He described it as “a new low in the agency’s sordid history of abusing its authority to evade accountability.”
“This attack on congressional investigators will not deter us from that duty, and the department must answer for this abuse,” Grassley continued.
Kash Patel was the House Intelligence Community investigator who discovered in August of 2017 that the Russian collusion dossier was actually just a nasty political trick that Hillary Clinton paid for. There was never any validity to the dossier. The Clinton campaign and the DNC used the Perkins-Couie law firm as a cutaway to pretend that the dossier was real, and it was handed over to the DOJ by “concerned citizens.” Patel received notice from a tech company last year that he had also been spied upon.
Patel has filed a lawsuit against the DOJ for violating his civil liberties.
Why is all of this a big deal? Because Executive branch agencies like the Justice Department are not allowed to spy on committee staffers who are investigating the Justice Department. It’s really that simple. Oversight is not a two-way street. There is no benevolent reason why the DOJ would subpoena all the text messages, emails, and phone calls from these staffers. They were looking for dirt that could be used to blackmail them into helping cover up the Russia collusion hoax.
The question now is whether any accountability for these alleged crimes committed by the Justice Department will ever happen.