'Monumental abuse of power': Attorney tears into Trump DOJ for secretly gathering data on reporter
On Thursday's edition of CNN's "The Situation Room," former federal prosecutor Elie Honig broke down the implications of the new report showing former President Donald Trump's Justice Department secretly collected phone and email records from CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr.
"What's your reaction, as someone who used to work at the Justice Department?" asked anchor Wolf Blitzer.
"Anybody who has the privilege of representing the United States as a federal prosecutor for the Justice Department is given enormous power and enormous discretion. It's really staggering how much power prosecutors have," said Honig. "It really falls to the integrity and good judgment and fair play of each individual. In this case, unless there was an imminent and grave threat — and there's zero to indicate that — then this was a monumental abuse of power, and it had to go to the top of the Justice Department. This would have had to have been approved by the attorney general."
"This wasn't just her phone number at the Pentagon. This was her home phone, her cell phones, her personal email accounts," said Blitzer. "The scope of this intrusion is really staggering, isn't it?"
"It is, Wolf. It's an incredibly invasive procedure," agreed Honig. "DOJ regulations recognize, because the First Amendment is at stake. The First Amendment is, of course, the cornerstone, the heart of our democracy. When the Justice Department obtains this information through subpoena, an almost entirely one-sided process, that sheds a real pall over the First Amendment. That's a real threat to the First Amendment because it will frighten people, it will deter them from talking to journalists. They think, if they talk to a journalist, DOJ may pull those records and see that I'm talking to her. That's the danger."
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