Thread by @bradheath

Inspector General says the Justice Department "failed to conduct a comprehensive legal analysis" before using administrative subpoenas to gather, in bulk, metadata about billions of telephone calls from the United States to other countries.

Some background: The DEA secretly gathered records of Americans' calls to 116 countries using a very aggressive interpretation of its subpoena powers. The program started under then- (and now) Attorney General William Barr. usatoday.com/story/news/201…

The DEA also used its administrative subpoena power to gather "bulk purchase data for a particular good or service." The Inspector General doesn't say what it was, but says the DEA demanded lists of customers.

DOJ Inspector General also confirms DEA agents were instructed to use "parallel construction" to avoid disclosing its surveillance programs. "There is nothing inherently inappropriate about using parallel construction," the IG said. But hiding it from prosecutors is bad.

It'll be interesting to see why the Justice Department thinks it can't disclose bulk data collections that ended in 2013.

The DEA said it never conducted any audits of how agents were using its secret surveillance program, because nobody ever complained that the program they had kept secret was being used improperly.

Attorney General William Barr "provided approval" for the DEA's bulk phone metadata surveillance program in 1992. For those keeping track, Barr is also the current attorney general.

The DOJ Inspector General's report says Attorney General William Barr approved legally questionable bulk surveillance of Americans in .... 1992.

Congress seemed incurious about a phone surveillance program in operation for 20 years.

DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel finally got around to conducting a comprehensive legal review of the DEA's phone metadata program in 2014, the year after it ended. But OLC terminated its review when the DEA didn't respond to follow-up questions.

IG burn.

Here's the other bulk surveillance program revealed in the IG report.

DEA served the subpoenas on companies saying they were done "pursuant to an official criminal investigation." But agents confirmed that wasn't true - they were bulk subpoenas, there was no target or suspected crime. And they didn't really know what the phrase meant, anyway.

The DEA phone data surveillance program was created in 1992, with authorization from William Barr and Robert Mueller. Those names seem familiar somehow.

Here's our story from 2015. usatoday.com/story/news/201…

And here's the IG report that confirms it: oig.justice.gov/reports/2019/o…

Story: The Justice Department under AG William Barr launched a vast phone-data collection program without first determining whether that would be legal, the department's inspector general said today, 27 years later.
(Guest-starring Robert Mueller.)

usatoday.com/story/news/pol…