FBI Caught Red-Handed: Bureau Spied on Eight U.S. Senators and One Congressman

Sen. Grassley: “Worse than Watergate”

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” says Yossarian, Joseph Heller’s terrified bomber pilot in Catch-22. The same could now be said by eight U.S. Senators and one U.S. House Member – all Republicans – who were secretly spied upon by the FBI during the Biden administration.
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For five years now, the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability has filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests demanding records from the FBI and other intelligence agencies about the possible surveillance of Members of Congress. We used every legal avenue – from FOIA requests to lawsuits – to compel the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the National Security Agency, and the Department of State to disclose documents about the possible surveillance of Members of Congress with oversight responsibility over this intelligence community.

In short, we wanted to know if the FBI and other agencies were “overseeing” their ostensible overseers in Congress.

The government’s only response was the flippant use of the “Glomar response,” a court-created doctrine in which an agency can issue a “neither confirm nor deny” answer. In one instance, a response from ODNI came back within four business days, unprecedented speed for the bureaucracy. The Glomar response was originally created to protect a super-secret CIA project to retrieve a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine. Now it is being used to hide domestic spying.

At the time, Gene Schaerr, PPSA general counsel, responded: “The government doesn’t want to even entertain our question. What do they have to hide?”

Now we know at least part of what the government has to hide.

The FBI in 2023 analyzed the phone records of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA).

Among them we count three sitting members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, charged with oversight of the FBI, as being targeted by Bureau surveillance.

What was the FBI up to? The FBI document states it “conducted preliminary toll analysis on limited toll records,” meaning it secured and analyzed calls made by these Members in relation to their votes on whether to certify the 2020 presidential election results. The FBI’s analyses were based on metadata – who called whom and when. As research from Stanford University has shown, such seemingly innocuous records can yield “surprisingly sensitive personal information” about the likely contents of those calls.

That is one reason why Sen. Chuck Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called this a “weaponization by federal law enforcement under Biden” that was “arguably worse than Watergate.”

We predict this is just the tip of the iceberg. The ease with which the FBI surveilled prominent Members of Congress hints at the underlying reasons for which PPSA’s queries have been batted away so consistently by the intelligence community. We believe that time will reveal that there is more – much more – evidence of the intelligence community accessing the private communications of Congress.

Next year Congress will hold a debate over the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It should be clear to all Members that the FBI can’t be trusted. We need reforms across the board, from ending the abuse of Section 702 as a source of warrantless domestic surveillance, to ending government data purchases.

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