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| PBS NEWSHOUR/YOUTUBE |
With this evidence only now coming out, one must wonder what other rights the special counsel’s office trampled.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office analyzed the text messages of some 40-plus Members of Congress, with newly released internal documents indicating that the lead investigators ignored the established filter team review process — a process instituted to protect attorney-client privileged communications. Those documents, released Tuesday by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, following whistleblowers tips, prove even more damning, though, to the special counsel’s brazen disregard of the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause.On Monday, Sen. Grassley made public a letter and records he obtained jointly with his colleague, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., as part of their oversight of the weaponization of the DOJ and FBI under the Biden Administration. That cover letter from the DOJ’s Office of Legislative Affairs explained to the senators that Special Counsel Smith’s team had established a filter team intended to protect privileged communications obtained during the investigators’ targeting of Donald Trump.
While the filter team protocols provided that “[n]o materials shall be disclosed to the investigative team without approval of a filter team attorney,” the DOJ’s Office of Legislative Affairs explained that documents uncovered based on whistleblower disclosures revealed that the special counsel’s office “apparently bypassed the Filter Team and directly accessed these text messages.” The “text messages” referenced were “text messages between White House personnel and several Senators and Representatives,” namely 44 different Members of Congress.
The records released yesterday by Sen. Grassley included a cache of 90 pages of emails and slides detailing the filter team process. An email dated May 27, 2022, from a contractor providing technical support to the special counsel’s office to Thomas Windom — an attorney working with Smith — proves particularly significant.
In that email, the contractor thanked Windom and his colleague, Kelly Zusman, for “jumping on an early call this morning to discuss” the “Filter Review workflow” related to the special counsel’s investigation into Trump. The summary that followed detailed the internal process and made clear that “the Filter Review Team” would make privilege determination before documents were reviewed by the investigative teams. The email stressed that if the filter team, which consisted of a group of DOJ lawyers not involved in the investigation, concluded the documents were privileged, they “will not be sent to the Substantive Team.”
Windom apparently initially followed that procedure, with an email dated June 26, 2023, showing the special counsel attorney forwarding to the contractor “a new NARA production for upload,” although why NARA provided the responsive documents directly to an investigator, as opposed to the filter team, is unclear. However, a later email dated August 21, 2023, shows NARA sending Windom a link to additional records, namely 54 spreadsheets, which include text messages of Members of Congress. Additional emails from the same date show that Windom downloaded those records and shared them with other members of the investigative team.
As Grassley explained:
NARA provided the texts to [the Special Counsel’s Office] on August 21, 2023. Within half an hour, one of Smith’s senior lawyers, Thomas Windom, downloaded the texts and, within one hour, other members of Smith’s investigative team downloaded and began reviewing the texts. It appears the review was done without waiting for the Filter Team to evaluate and segregate privileged information.
The apparent bypassing of the filter team by the Special Counsel Office is but the latest scandal surrounding Jack Smith’s crusade against Trump — but it also represents only a portion of the problem revealed in the latest document dump: The records released yesterday show that the filter team utterly failed to consider the Speech or Debate privilege held by senators and congressmen.
Specifically, presentation slides that summarized the filter team’s purpose and process note that the task was to “review information gathered from email accounts and devices for attorney-client privilege and work product information.” The opening slide also notes that “the investigation team presented a filter protocol,” but then none of the slides even mention the Speech or Debate privilege.
This proves particularly outrageous because Windom, who on May 27, 2022 coordinated with the outside contractor concerning the filter review process, had just ten days earlier been alerted to controlling D.C. Circuit precedent that requires Members of Congress to be given an opportunity to “identify and assert the privilege with respect to legislative materials before their compelled disclosure to Executive agents.” --->READ MORE HERE
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