WASHINGTON, DC—There is a reason Democrats and their complicit media have been trying to kneecap Kash Patel, President-elect Trump’s choice to replace DC swamp rat Christopher Wray as head of the FBI, and Pam Bondi, his choice for Attorney General. According to The Federalist, the Department of Justice has been on a years-long mission to undermine those who oversee executive branch agencies. A recently released Justice Department Inspector General report revealed this disturbing news.
According to The Federalist, the result was an evisceration of the separation of powers, undermining civil liberties and violating any modicum of transparency. This has been going on for at least seven years.
According to the IG report, the beginning of this scheme coincided with the Russiagate scandal. An unauthorized source from within the Justice Department apparently leaked classified information to friendly media, such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, concerning Donald Trump and Russia.
One of the leaks revealed that a FISA warrant had been issued to conduct surveillance on Trump’s foreign policy adviser, Carter Page. Those warrants ended up being renewed four times, the IG found. The leaks painted Page as a Russian asset, which was accomplished by omitting “critical exculpatory information” and relying on the now-debunked Steele dossier, which federal agents never corroborated. Former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith was eventually indicted and pleaded guilty to making a false statement in connection with the bogus FISA application.
All of this was undertaken to frame Trump as a Russian agent and ended up destroying Page’s reputation while violating his Constitutional rights, all part of a “fishing expedition” designed to undermine Trump. And, that was accomplished by haunting the Trump administration for the first two years of his first term.
The IG said federal investigators then undertook a “mole hunt” for the Russiagate leaker, issuing subpoenas for non-content records of phone numbers and email addresses targeting two members of Congress and 43 staffers, including Republicans and Democrats. This was based on the grounds that they may have been the source of the classified information that made its way to the media.
In many cases, the IG report said, the justification was mainly “the close proximity in time between that access and the subsequent publication of the news articles.”
Targeted information included “text message logs, email recipient addresses, and call detail records indicating who initiated communications, with which numbers, dates, times, durations, etc., which “would have provided a map to the professional and personal lives” of those under surveillance, The Federalist wrote.
Federal investigators also applied for court non-disclosure orders, which prevented communication companies such as Verizon, AT&T, etc., from informing members of Congress and staffers that their records had been subpoenaed. This allowed them to keep those being surveilled “in the dark.”
The Department of Justice obtained 40 NDOs, 30 of which were renewed at least once, and most were repeatedly renewed for four years.
Among those targeted was Jason Foster, a top staffer for Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who was then the ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. At that time, the Senate Judiciary Committee was investigating the Trump-Russia investigation.
Aside from Grassley, then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was also targeted. One of his top investigators was Kash Patel, who also had his records subpoenaed. Patel helped expose the feds’ abuses regarding the Carter Page warrants via the “Nunes Memo” as well as much of the other corruption undertaken by the Russiagate investigators. Do you wonder why they are so afraid of Kash Patel? Here is your answer.
At that time, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein threatened to subpoena Patel’s communications and those of Patel’s colleagues in January 2018, only weeks before the memo's release, “over their vigorous investigating of the investigators.”
However, unknown to Patel, those records had already been retrieved under subpoena, with requests dating back to at least Dec. 1, 2016. Neither Foster nor Patel knew their records had been subpoenaed until the Biden administration, when communications companies could finally disclose the secret subpoenas.
Worse yet, the DOJ’s NDO applications to the courts didn’t advise that those who would be kept uninformed were members of Congress or their staff. According to the IG, the NDOs “relied on general assertions about the need for non-disclosure rather than on case-specific justifications. Department policy at the time did not require including information in applications about whose records are at issue.” DOJ policy permitted (and still does) “prosecutors to make boilerplate statements in NDO applications.”
It wasn’t until they were caught during the Biden administration that the DOJ issued a “new congressional investigations policy ostensibly requiring greater scrutiny of and higher-level approvals for subpoenas and NDOs, while still not requiring approval from or notification of the attorney general and deputy attorney general.” This past September, after reviewing the IG report, the DOJ finally created rules mandating that prosecutors notify the court when an NDO involves a congressional office or staffer.
One interesting revelation in the IG report is that it is harder to subpoena communications records from media members than legislative branch members, which differs from the Congressional Investigations policy, which has no “exhaustion requirement.” In that case, prosecutors don’t need to exhaust “all other reasonable means of identifying the sources of the unauthorized disclosures” before seeking a subpoena. In the case of the media, however, the feds must request “Attorney General authorization.”
Yet, despite modifying the Congressional Investigations Policy, the IG report wrote that it’s not clear that the policy covers illegal leaks. The policy is in a chapter of the DOJ’s Justice Manual called “Protection of Government Integrity. " The first provision states that the chapter deals with crimes “including bribery of public officials and accepting a gratuity, election crimes, and other related offenses.” Unauthorized disclosures appear nowhere on the list.
The IG report found no evidence of “retaliatory or political motivation” for issuing the subpoenas. Yet, it warned that such efforts risk “chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch” while, at a minimum, creating “the appearance of inappropriate interference…in legitimate oversight authority.”
The IG notes that no leaker was ever charged despite the apparent malfeasance in these incidents.
For these reasons, Kash Patel and Pam Bondi must be confirmed. The swamp knows they will get to the bottom of the corruption in the DOJ and other federal agencies, and the rats will be identified, flushed out, and hopefully prosecuted.
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