In the first Trump administration, the Justice Department launched four sprawling leak investigations that ultimately targeted two Democrats in Congress, dozens of congressional staffers from both parties, and eight reporters at three national outlets, said a report from the top DOJ watchdog on Tuesday.
The Justice Department inspector general found prosecutors never notified courts that they were seeking email and phone records for sitting members of Congress and their aides. The DOJ also did not follow its own rules around spying on journalists, according to the report, says The Intercept.
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With Trump weeks away from returning to the White House and packing the DOJ and FBI with loyalists, the report is a reminder that agency rules are ineffective to check abuses, especially when the rules themselves are unclear or leave considerable discretion to individual prosecutors about whether and how they apply.
“The Inspector General’s revelations are beyond disturbing,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), "It is particularly concerning that the Department of Justice hoodwinked a judge into signing off on secret surveillance on both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.”
“As these abuses demonstrate, there are few guardrails preventing a lone prosecutor or the Attorney General, the Department of Justice or even state or local law enforcement from spying on Congress and threatening our constitutional system of checks and balances,” Wyden said.
Press freedom advocates were disturbed but not surprised at the inspector general’s findings. Seth Stern of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said Congress needs to step in and protect journalists and their sources through legislation like the PRESS Act, which has been sitting in the Senate after passing the House of Representatives unanimously in early 2024.
“We don’t need to waste ink on years-late 100-page reports to confirm that the DOJ disregards these policies at its whim. We already know that,” Stern said. said. “We need to pass the PRESS Act.”
The report offers a detailed but anonymized account of four leak investigations, which were all launched in 2017 under Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and continued under his successor, Bill Barr. They aimed to identify the leakers behind stories published by the Washington Post, CNN, and the New York Times.
The investigations became public during the Biden administration, which set off a flurry of protest from Congress and the media. The inspector general launched a review in summer 2021.
“The Department did not charge anyone in these investigations with unauthorized disclosure of classified information, and all four of the investigations are now closed,” the report said
In addition to demanding records from Apple, Google, and other service providers — for which investigators often don’t need a warrant or other court order, under the federal Stored Communications Act — prosecutors also asked judges to impose gag orders that prohibited the providers from notifying the targets.
Many of these gags were repeatedly renewed with only boilerplate justifications, the inspector general found, and courts extended some as long as four years. The DOJ successfully asked judges to extend gag orders after the leak investigations became public in 2021.
In response to the inspector general’s review, the Justice Department implemented some rules, including a new requirement in the department manual to notify judges when gag orders concern members of Congress and their aides. Thee new rules are still insufficiently clear, however, the watchdog warned.
The updated rules typically required the DOJ to notify media in advance of any surveillance demands, so that journalists and press outlets could challenge them in court or negotiate the scope. The guidelines also required a committee of high-ranking DOJ officials to consider plans to subpoena reporters and for the attorney general to personally sign off.
Despite these changes in response to recent scandals, the Trump DOJ did not fully follow the department’s guidelines, the inspector general found.
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