OIG Report on Trump Justice Department’s Acquisition of Congressional Phone Records

On Dec. 10, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released “A Review of the Department of Justice’s Issuance of Compulsory Process to Obtain Records of Members of Congress, Congressional Staffers, and Members of the News Media.” The report summarizes the OIG’s investigation into whether the Justice Department violated its own policies when it obtained text and phone records of two members of Congress and 43 Congressional staffers in 2017 and 2018, following the publication of articles in CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post that contained classified information. The OIG also looked into whether the Justice Department sought these records based on party affiliation.

According to the report, the Inspector General “did not find any evidence of retaliatory or political motivation by the career prosecutors” who compelled the members of Congress and Congressional staffers to turn over records. However, the OIG writes: 

[W]e believe that using compulsory process to obtain such records when based solely on the close proximity in time between access to the classified information and subsequent publication of the information— which was the case with most of the process issued for non-content communications records of congressional staff in the investigations we examined—risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch because it exposes congressional officials to having their records reviewed by the Department solely for conducting Congress’s constitutionally authorized oversight duties and creating, at a minimum, the appearance of inappropriate interference by the executive branch in legitimate oversight activity by the legislative branch.

The Inspector General also notes that after reviewing a draft of the report and its recommendations in September, the Justice Department “revised applicable DOJ policies…in response to the concerns we identified.”  

You can read the report here, or below: