“Notwithstanding whether there was sufficient predication for the leak investigation itself, including family members and minor children strikes me as extremely aggressive,” David Laufman, a former Justice Department official who worked on leak investigations, told the Times. Moreover, just as it did in investigating news organizations, the Justice Department secured a gag order on Apple that expired this year, according to a person familiar with the inquiry, so lawmakers did not know they were being investigated until Apple informed them last month. While Justice Department leak investigations are routine, current and former congressional officials familiar with the inquiry said they could not recall an instance in which the records of lawmakers had been seized as part of one. The zeal in the Trump administration’s efforts to hunt leakers led to the extraordinary step of subpoenaing communications metadata from members of Congress-a nearly unheard-of move outside of corruption investigations. He moved a trusted prosecutor from New Jersey with little relevant experience to the main Justice Department to work on the Schiff-related case and about a half dozen others, according to three people with knowledge of his work who did not want to be identified discussing federal investigations. Barr revived languishing leak investigations after he became attorney general a year later. And while the department under Sessions was ultimately unable to tie Schiff and Swalwell to the leaks, that didn’t stop his successor, the even slipperier Bill Barr, who used his gig as attorney general to settle Trump’s scores, from giving it another shot. According to the Times, in an attempt to find out who was behind leaks of classified information concerning contacts between Trump associates and Russia, the DOJ seized the records of at least a dozen people connected to the Intelligence Committee between 20. (Trump, you may recall, regularly called the California Democrat “ Shifty Schiff” and on at least one occasion said he should be arrested and tried for treason.) And the administration didn’t just go after the records of the two lawmakers-it demanded those of aides and family members too, including one underage child. Weeks after it emerged that Trump’s DOJ surveilled numerous journalists from outlets he regularly attacked, The New York Times reports that the Justice Department, then led by Jeff Sessions, took the “highly unusual step” of subpoenaing Apple for data from the accounts of Democratic representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, who serve on the House Intelligence Committee.
Like, for instance, siccing the Justice Department on his enemies in Congress. The thing about Donald Trump‘s four years in office is that despite the fact that we knew in real time about most of the awful, corrupt, legitimately evil shit he pulled, months after his departure from the White House we’re still learning about previously unknown but equally terrible stuff he did.
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