It was revealed this week that President Donald Trump used the Justice Department to spy on two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee and the White House counsel. New facts are becoming known about how Trump was able to do it through the Justice Department, which should be a check on illegally using spying against Democratic foes.
According to CNN.com, "the Justice Department's original secret subpoena to Apple, sources say, was an effort to identify people connected with the staffer. Apple provided names connected to the accounts the company had records for, including then-House Intelligence ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), two vocal political enemies of former President Donald Trump. This was potentially the first instance federal investigators knew they had records of the two California Democrats, according to the sources."
According to sources, CNN said that the Justice Department didn't even know that McGahn was being sucked up into its vacuum bag of corruption. The spying all went back to the leak of a story about Trump and Russia that the former president was furious about. So, he staged his own investigation to uncover who was behind the leak. He and his staff got phone records from CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times as well as members of Congres.
Neither Schiff nor Swalwell were found to have been the leakers, but it didn't stop Trump from going off on his own attack in speeches, at rallies and in television interviews.
"It's unclear what, if anything, the investigators did to alert supervisors after the names of lawmakers were turned over in the records obtained through the subpoena," said the report. "DOJ officials say it's possible the current procedures were technically followed despite claims by senior former officials to not know about the moves. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco is now conducting a review of those procedures."
"There is a lot we don't know, including how the department came to seek those records and whether prosecutors understood what records they were requesting," Schiff wrote in an op-ed this week. "We still don't know whether only Democrats were the subjects of these requests or whether the investigation was properly predicated. The department has yet to explain."
Ironically, Trump spent years claiming that former President Barack Obama spied on his campaign. He was never able to prove it with evidence.
