Seized House Records Show Just How Far Trump Admin Would Go

by Colleen Long

Associated Press

Saturday June 12, 2021

Former President Donald Trump speaks at the North Carolina Republican Convention in Greenville, N.C.  (Source:AP Photo/Chris Seward)






White House spokesman Andrew Bates said the conduct of Trump's Justice Department was a shocking misuse of authority.

"Attorneys general's only loyalty should be to the rule of law — never to politics," he said.



"The question here is just how did Trump use his political power to go after his enemies — how did he use the government for his political benefit," said Kathleen Clark, legal ethics scholar at Washington University in St. Louis.

The effort to obtain the data came as Trump was publicly and privately fuming over investigations by Congress and then-special counsel Robert Mueller into his 2016 campaign's ties to Russia.

Trump inveighed against leaks throughout his time in office, accusing a "deep state" of working to undermine him by sharing unflattering information. He repeatedly called on his Justice Department and attorneys general to "go after the leakers," including singling out former FBI Director James Comey and Schiff, now chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

In May of 2018, he tweeted that reports of leaks in his White House were exaggerated, but said that nonetheless, "leakers are traitors and cowards, and we will find out who they are!"





For some, the Trump administration's effort is more disturbing than Nixon's actions during Watergate that forced his resignation. Nixon's were done in secret out of the White House, while the Trump administration moves to take the congressmen's records were approved by top Justice Department officials and worked on by prosecutors, who obtained secret subpoenas from a federal judge and then gag orders to keep them quiet.

"The fate of Richard Nixon had a restraining effect on political corruption in America," said Timothy Naftali, a Nixon scholar and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. "It didn't last forever, but the Republican Party wanted to cleanse itself of Nixon's bad apples and bad actors."


"The reason to do this is not revenge," Naftali said. "It's to send a signal to future American lawyers they will be held accountable."


A less rare but still uncommon tool is to secretly seize reporters' phone records, something the Trump Justice Department also did. Following an outcry from press freedom organizations, Garland announced last week that it would cease the practice of going after journalists' sourcing information.





Apple said in a statement that it couldn't even challenge the warrants because it had so little information available and "it would have been virtually impossible for Apple to understand the intent of the desired information without digging through users' accounts."

Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the seizure of congressional records was part of a series of Trump-era investigations that "raise profound civil liberties concerns and involve spying powers that have no place in our democracy."


