An Obama-appointed federal judge is facing scrutiny from legal experts who say he may have violated federal law by authorizing the Biden Justice Department (DOJ) to secretly obtain private cell phone data from Republican senators.
In 2023, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia James Boasberg reportedly signed off on orders that barred cell phone carriers from notifying 11 Republican members of Congress about subpoenas issued by special counsel Jack Smith. The subpoenas sought data from the lawmakers’ phones related to January 4 and January 7, 2021, as part of Smith’s ongoing probe into the 2020 election and President Donald Trump.
According to records released by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, the subpoenas requested “detail records for inbound and outbound calls, text messages, direct connect, and voicemail messages,” but did not seek the contents of any communications. Judge Boasberg justified the secrecy by claiming that disclosure could “result in destruction of or tampering with evidence,” the records show.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reports that ;egal experts argue those orders may have crossed a legal boundary if they involved official congressional phone lines. Mike Fragoso, former chief counsel to then-Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, pointed to a federal statute that explicitly protects Senate communications providers from being restricted “through operation of any court order or any statutory provision” from notifying Senate offices about legal requests for their data.
“If Smith or Boasberg violated that statute, it’s a very serious problem that probably justifies a bar investigation and could predicate an impeachment inquiry,” Fragoso wrote on X.
Roger Severino, Vice President of Domestic Policy at the Heritage Foundation, also criticized the move, posting on X: “Safe bet: All the legal ethics ‘experts’ trotted out on CNN who mercilessly hounded @JeffClarkUS and @DrJohnEastman for giving legal advice around Jan. 6th will be MIA on the issue of the proper discipline for actual defiance of a federal statute by a biased anti-Trump judge.”
The DOJ subpoenas reportedly targeted Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Ted Cruz of Texas, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Rick Scott of Florida, and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, along with Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania.
“Congress enacts laws,” wrote Empower Oversight founder Jason Foster on X. “The perma-Executive and Judicial Branches simply ignore them. If your elected Congress can’t or won’t control unelected bureaucrats in DC, then representative gov’t is merely an illusion.”