Judicial Watch Sues DOJ for Electronic Communication that Initiated Counterintelligence Investigation of President Trump’s 2016 Campaign

One month after the House Intelligence Committee received a copy of the Electronic Communication (EC) Judicial Watch seeks, it announced, ‘We have found no evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians’ 

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for communications related to the initiation of the counterintelligence investigation of President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-02743)).

The suit was filed after the DOJ and FBI both failed to respond to identical July 11, 2019, FOIA requests seeking access to a single record: “The Electronic Communication that initiated the counterintelligence investigation of President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.” Included with each FOIA request was an April 2018 letter from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (Intelligence Committee) to the Justice Department concerning a congressional subpoena for the same record.

The Justice Department initially provided the Intelligence Committee a heavily redacted copy of the electronic communication it sought. Only after the Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena did the DOJ, on April 10, 2018, provide a less redacted version, which has not been released publicly.

In March 2018, based upon the information contained in the DOJ communication and other information, the Intelligence Committee produced a 150-page report, the summary of which states: “We have found no evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians.” In an interview after reviewing the electronic communication, Nunes said, “We now know there was no official intelligence used to start this investigation.”

So it took us a long time to actually get this … electronic communication … What [were] the original reasons that the counterintelligence investigation was started? Now this is really important to us because the counterintelligence investigation uses the tools of our intelligence services that are not supposed to be used on American citizens, so we’ve long wanted to know … what intelligence … actually led to this investigation. So what we found now after the investigators have reviewed it is that in fact there was no intelligence.

“The FBI and DOJ are still covering up the corruption behind the Obama administration’s illicit spying on President Trump,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The original document behind the ‘counterintelligence’ spy operation against President Trump is key to exposing the corruption of Spygate. It is beyond belief the FBI and DOJ are still hiding it.”

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