Is it fair to say you dealt with a lot of whistleblower and whistleblower stories? Yes.

My boss, Chuck Grassley, was a major proponent of whistleblower rights. And so, you know, he was on the leading edge of whistleblower, not only whistleblower policy issues, but using whistleblower information to do congressional oversight. Do

you think that ruffled a lot of feathers inside the federal government when whistleblowers inside agencies would come to Senator Grassley with stories? Oh,

absolutely, always. I mean, you know, it was one of the best ways that we could get information when the Justice Department or the FBI in particular, you know, was withholding information from us. Sometimes we would get that information from whistleblowers or we would get information from whistleblowers that they would never have voluntarily turned over. In

a short summary of a couple sentences, if you can, before we dig into the specifics, how would you summarize this story to someone that hasn't followed it and doesn't know anything about what goes on?

The attorneys for your elected representatives in Congress who are supposed to hold DOJ and the FBI accountable for potential abuses were targeted by those organizations. Their communications were targeted using a grand jury subpoena. And the government secretly collected all of the contact information, who they talked to, how long they talked to them, who they emailed, how many times they emailed them, exactly when. All that information was collected by the FBI using a grand jury subpoena on the pretext that it was to investigate a leak of classified information that those staffers had had access to. And they filed an order with the court that ordered the providers who turned over that information, like Google in my case, to keep that information secret. And they renewed that order once a year, every year, for six years. So long after the underlying case that they were investigating that served as the pretext for this collection of all this data was done and over with and closed, they were still asking the court for permission to keep it secret.

They were surveilling you and other staffers on Capitol Hill. They

were absolutely surveilling our communications, yes. Now, they didn't get the content of the communications, which they are quick to point out. But the argument that we're making is when it comes to the government identifying who the oversight attorneys who are doing oversight of the Justice Department are speaking with, even the so-called metadata, who we're talking to, when we're talking to them, how long we talk, that is essentially the same as it's just as good as content if the government is trying to identify who's giving us information, who in the government is speaking with us. For

a period of six months, what happened? Yeah,

for a period of several months in 2017, while I was the chief oversight and investigations counsel for Chuck Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee, in the midst of the Trump-Russia saga, when we were doing investigative work on FISA abuses by the DOJ, and we had reviewed the FISA application for the Carter Page FISA, which was a big controversy. During that time, during about a six-month period during that time, the government was secretly collecting all the communications records from my personal phone and email accounts. So

government was surveilling you at a time when they were under investigation for surveillance abuses.

Yes, and there was lots of conflict with Congress over, you know, the FBI didn't want to admit, didn't want to turn over documents, didn't want us talking to certain witnesses. You know, it was a very, it was a highly confrontational, high profile investigation that we were doing of the abuses in the Carter Page FISA matter.

What do you suspect they were looking for? If we don't take them at their word that they were looking to identify who may have committed a leak or a potential crime, what do you think they were really doing? Yeah,

so I'm not sure that the initial purpose was to go after whistleblowers, I know that there wasn't a justification for putting that kind of scrutiny on the attorneys for their oversight committees in Congress, unless they were putting the same level of scrutiny on everyone in the executive branch who had access to that Carter Page FISA application. So while I don't know that they were up to no good, I know that it was pretty easy for them to collect the information and pretty easy for them to keep the fact that they collected all the information secret. And what I'm trying to find out with my litigation now is what arguments they made to the court and how much they told the court. Did they tell the court that they were seeking the communications of all these congressional staffers, or did they just have a list of phone numbers and a list of emails and didn't notify the court, oh, these are our congressional oversight staffers that we're seeking information on. How

big a violation and what kind of violation do you see this as? Well,

I think it's a violation of the separation of powers because the Senate and the House should have had an opportunity before their staff's attorney's information is collected to raise any objections to that. Congress can't do its job of oversight if it doesn't have, you know, free-flowing access to information from whistleblowers. And certainly whistleblower communications are absolutely going to be chilled. They are going to be less likely to speak to Congress if they believe that the fact that they talk to Congress will be immediately unmasked and disclosed to the people back at the agency about whom they're trying to disclose wrongdoing. In

terms of the size of this as a violation, how important do you think it is? Well,

I know in the one case that my subpoena was related to, there were about a dozen congressional staffers and members. I also know that there are several other so-called leak investigations that the inspector general at the Justice Department is looking at on a number of other matters. And there were several, I don't know the numbers on those, but there were many, both members and staffs, personal email and phone numbers, metadata and information was collected.

So this was kept secret from you at the time, and then you said six years later you found out about it. What were the circumstances of you finally being notified?

So they applied for what's called a non-disclosure order.

The Department of Justice?

The Department of Justice applied for non-disclosure orders, which by department policy can only last for one year. So they applied for one in 2017 when they sent the initial subpoena. And then they applied for a renewal of that every year, every 12 months for the next six years. And finally, in 2023, in 2022, they let it expire. And then that freed Google to send out notices to the customers, including myself, who had complied with the subpoena and provided their information. So

you got a letter from Google or an email?

I got an email from Google. And what

did it say?

It said, this is to notify you that, you know, in 2017, we complied with compulsory process, you know, and provided your information from your Google Voice telephone number and your Google email to the department. We complied with the subpoena. And

it told you the Department of Justice had issued a subpoena. Was your head just spending? They

gave me a copy of the subpoena. I got a copy. It was redacted. Certain information was redacted, like the other people's email addresses and the other people's phone numbers. But I soon learned who, you know, who a lot of those other people were. But yeah, my head was spinning. And so I knew what dates that they had sought my data for. They had two phone numbers on there for me, one of whom, one of those phone numbers belongs to my wife who never spoke to a reporter ever and never had any access to any information that they had any right to be concerned about. Um, so yeah, it sort of blew my mind that, um, not only that they had done it, if I had learned about it sooner, I don't think it would have been that surprising. I mean, I had access to the Carter Page FISA application, which was a big controversy, and it leaked to a reporter a few weeks after they had provided it to Congress. So that was their pretext, right? So I knew at the time, even when it leaked, I thought, oh, my goodness, well, I've seen that, and now I see it in the press. So now that might be an excuse to come after people in Congress. But what really surprised me was how long they fought to keep it secret, even after the underlying case about the Carter Page FISA leak was over. There are two renewals that were filed and approved by the court, even after that case was closed. So there's no, you know, and the reasons, the justification for these orders is supposedly so that the, you know, the person who owns the information, me, my email data, my phone records, that I wouldn't be able to destroy them before the government got them. Like, that's what it says in the statute. Well, they had it since 2017. Google complied with the subpoena in 2017. There's nothing I could do to keep the government from getting it. So what was the harm in letting me know that they had done that, especially two years after the case had closed? That's what's still baffling to me. It seems like they're trying to hide something.

What court handles those and the secrecy that happened? So

in my case, it was the district court for the District of Columbia. And that's because that's where the grand jury subpoena, you know, occurred.