Highlight 🧵for our motion to intervene and unseal @TheJusticeDept arguments for hiding its broad subpoenas for phone and email logs of attorneys advising congressional oversight committees. ⬇️
In 2017, when @TheJusticeDept and @FBI were resisting aggressive congressional oversight of FISA abuses, they secretly launched what looks like a broad retaliatory effort to target attorneys for their congressional oversight committees.
Using grand jury subpoenas and gag orders to companies like Google, they deployed a broad dragnet to covertly collect detailed logs of their overseers' patterns of communications.
They did not flag the important constitutional, privilege, and #whistleblower confidentiality issues implicated by this dragnet.
Rather, they simply sent a list of our phone numbers and email addresses—w/o mentioning we were attorneys advising committees doing oversight of DOJ.
DOJ convinced the court to order service providers like Google to simply comply and shut up about it.
What did @TheJusticeDept tell court? The whole truth, a series of misleading half-truths, or something else?
Who knows. It's all still sealed more than half a decade later.
Well, this is America.
It's supposed to be a free country, where court records are open to the public and the First Amendment guarantees our right to know what our government claims in court—so we and our elected leaders can figure out if its BS.
"Democracy Dies in Darkness"
Due process: notice and an opportunity to be heard.
Is that too much to ask?
Transparency = accountability.
There is no legitimate reason to keep the government's ex parte claims in support of these gag orders secret after all these years.
Let's see them. Let's see how compelling, accurate, and complete they are.
Our press release…
empowr.us/empower-oversi…
And the complete court filing is here…
empowr.us/wp-content/upl…
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