PPSA Files Lawsuit Today to Learn: Does the FBI Spy on Members of Congress Who Question Its Surveillance, Unmasking Practices?

​The Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability filed a lawsuit today in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia against the Department of Justice and FBI. PPSA is seeking records in which Members of Congress queried U.S. intelligence agencies about surveilling them and their colleagues.
 
“Spying on Members of Congress for suggesting that they’ve been spied on would be the kind of circular logic our government excels at,” said Gene Schaerr, PPSA general counsel. “Could Congressional criticism prompt government surveillance of these very Members?”
 

• Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told journalists in 2017 that he has “reason to believe” someone unmasked his identity in a call monitored by U.S. intelligence. He asked if a prior administration was involved in “politicizing” any of the almost 2,000 conversations of Americans collected inadvertently by intelligence agencies while surveilling foreigners.

 

• On the other side of the aisle, then-Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) in 2009 vigorously denied leaked reports that a federal wiretap had shown her offering to help two pro-Israeli lobbyists accused of espionage. She called for the release of the full transcript of this wiretap and received a letter from the Department of Justice declaring her to be neither a subject nor a target of investigation.

 

• In 2017, then Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) tweeted “deeply troubling reports that Obama officials unmasked Trump transition members 4 political purposes, I joined letter demanding answers.”

 

• Former Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) said that journalists in 2015 had played a leaked recording for him of a conversation he had conducted in 2011 with a foreign official while he was still a member of the House of Representatives.

 
Members of Congress who have questioned the surveillance policies of administrations of both parties continue to voice suspicion that they may have been spied upon by the agencies they oversee. With this concern in mind, PPSA filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI on Dec. 13, 2019, asking for information on the unmasking of a dozen members and former members of Congress who had made public inquiries into the U.S. intelligence community’s surveillance of them. PPSA specifically targeted correspondence between intelligence agencies and these Members of Congress, Congressional leadership and intelligence agencies about the unmasking of Members of Congress.
 
PPSA’s lawsuit holds that if Members of Congress have queried these agencies, as they have publicly said they have, then the records of this correspondence must surely exist.
 
On Oct. 13, 2020, the FBI denied the FOIA request and issued a “Glomar” non-response response that neither confirms nor denies the existence of such records. Having further exhausted all administrative remedies, PPSA today filed a lawsuit to compel the Department of Justice to produce these records.
 
“Americans deserve to know if a Member of Congress can be targeted for surveillance for daring to question the activities of intelligence agencies,” Schaerr said. “Under our Constitution, it is Congress that should oversee intelligence agencies, not the other way around.”