The FBI Spying on US Citizens

For John, BLUF:  During my youth Mr J Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI, and apparently played fast and loose with the rules.  We didn't know.  It didn't get better and in the last three Administrations it may have gotten worse.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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DOJ collected Project Veritas emails but didn't reveal it to federal judge overseeing case

From Hot Air, by Reporter John Sexton, 27 March 2022 3:30 PM ET.

Here is the lede plus one:

An attorney for Project Veritas sent a letter to District Court Judge Analisa Torres accusing the Department of Justice of sidestepping her prior rulings designed to protect the journalistic and attorney-client privileges of the organization.  Microsoft recently revealed that the DOJ had previously seized Project Veritas documents from a cloud account using a warrant which was not revealed to the court and which Microsoft was forbidden from revealing until recently.

At the base of all of this is the FBI investigation into how Project Veritas wound up in possession of Ashley Biden’s diary.  An FBI raid of homes belonging to Project Veritas CEO James O’Keefe and two former PV journalists, resulted in the FBI seizing a number of phones, laptops, thumb drives, etc. last November.  Project Veritas asked Judge Torres to appoint a Special Master to review the seized information and determine what should and should not be turned over to authorities.  Judge Torres agreed and ordered everything that had been gathered turned over to the Special Master.  But even after she issued that decision, the DOJ didn’t reveal the PV documents it had already collected from Microsoft and went behind Judge Torres back and the back of the Special Master she appointed to keep the previously seized documents a secret.

I get that the FBI can lie to us, but we can't lie to them.  However, they can lie to a Judge?  That seems a little too much of an insult to the Bill of Rights.

Democracy does better when the People think that their Government is not violating their rights, or the rights of other of their Federal Citizens  This is a problem for the US Congress to fix.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff