On Friday, Democrats burst over news that Donald trump’s Justice Department secretly surveilled and leaked the contacts with Russia, reaping the phone records of top political foes in what they called an unprecedented abuse of power.

The Justice Department took an extraordinary step of subpoenaing data from Apple on top Democrats, their families, and their staff too. 

Recently, Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell said they were told by Apple that during 2017-2021 the company had been ordered to hand over records of their phone communications, as well as those of family members including a child, as Trump fought a flow of damaging leaks on his 2016 election campaign’s links to Russia. Although no proof of them being behind the leaks was ever found but the probe was kept alive for as long as Trump remained in the office till January 2021. 

Schiff said that the politicization of the department and the attacks on the rule of law are among the most dangerous assaults on our democracy carried out by the former president. He also called it  “the weaponization of law enforcement by a corrupt president.”

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Senate leaders threatened two of Trump’s attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr to subpoena, to testify on the issue.  Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin said that it was a gross use of power and an assault on the separation of powers.

The Justice Department, now led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden said on Friday that its inspector general will investigate the use of subpoenas and other powers to probe lawmakers and journalists under Trump. The secret surveillance took place as trump faced investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller and by the House Intelligence Committee. Analysts called the collection of lawmakers’ phone data one of the most egregious abuses by a president since Richard Nixon’s early 1970s Watergate scandal.

As the investigation progressed and the threat of impeachment intensified, Donald Trump accused Schiff and other Democrats of leaking the classified intelligence to the media. Although it was unknown whether Trump explicitly told the Justice Department to investigate Schiff Swalwell. Between 2017 and 2020, he repeatedly accused Adam Schiff of leaks and tweeted more than 350 times about the senior Democrat.

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Swalwell said the investigation began in 2017, with the Justice Department telling Apple to hand over the metadata of calls and texts, essentially the phone numbers of those in contact with the subjects of the probe. However, the surveillance remained secret because Apple was placed under a “gag order” that was renewed three times between 2017 and 2020, even though no charges were generated. Swalwell and Schiff only learned of the surveillance in May after the last gag order on Apple expired.

The Justice Department handles cases gingerly and cases like collecting lawmaker’s phone records are virtually unheard of and are except in corruption investigations. Surveilling members of Congress, particularly the rivals of the President’s  Republican party, is an extreme case that will demand string justification and top-level approval in the department. Schiff said that around 100 people covered, it appears to be a poorly justified  “fishing expedition.”

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The Justice Department revealed that trump collected the phone records of a number of high-profile journalists in leak investigations. Swalwell said according to the surveillance, the House Intelligence investigation turned up information “that the president didn’t like. We showed that the president sought help from Russia, benefitted from help from Russia” in the 2016 election.