Looks like the Alphabet Boys are facing another controversy. Former official under the Trump Administration, Kash Patel, has filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In the lawsuit, he alleges that the DOJ and FBI sought to obtain personal data from his email account in an unconstitutional manner.
The lawsuit names seven individuals who were officials at the time as defendants, including FBI Director Chris Wray and former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jessie Liu.
Patel claims that the DOJ violated his Fourth Amendment rights as well as the separation of powers principle when it sought to gain access to his private emails through a third-party subpoena without proper public scrutiny or justification.
The lawsuit alleges that rather than seeking information openly from Mr. Patel’s official accounts, which would have provoked an immediate response from Congress, DOJ instead sought to access his private accounts through a third-party subpoena “to avoid public scrutiny, because they were improperly investigating the man who was investigating them.”
Additionally, according to this same complaint, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein threatened several staffers on the committee with subpoenas in an attempt to resist their oversight efforts.
This comes after Patel had played an instrumental role in uncovering details related to the Steele dossier which was financed by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign—leading to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants being used against former Trump advisor Carter Page.
On top of this, according to Patel’s lawsuit, Rod Rosenstein—also named as a defendant—threatened to subpoena several other committee staffers in response to their oversight, with one staffer calling it a “not-so-veiled threat to unleash the full prosecutorial power of the state against us”.
Google responded to said subpoena on December 5th 2017 but apparently Patel only became aware once Google notified him five days later on December 12th 2022.
Unfortunately, neither Liu nor Rosenstein nor Greaves responded immediately when asked for comments regarding this case by Daily Caller News Foundation but the FBI declined comment altogether.
