Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, lashed out at President-elect Donald Trump’s former Department of Justice for obtaining records of lawmakers, staffers and journalists during an investigation of leaks.

In a report released Tuesday, the Justice Department’s inspector general said the DOJ targeted two lawmakers and 43 staffers in an effort to unearth leaks to journalists. Records of Trump’s pick to be the next FBI director, Kash Patel, were obtained as a part of the investigation. Patel was serving as a House staffer at the time.

“This report lays out outrageous behavior by the Department of Justice, where members of Congress and staff of the Intelligence Committee, the committee that I chair, had phone records and email records that were accessed by the Department of Justice without court review,” Turner told CNN on Tuesday.

Turner argued that new protections put in place by Attorney General Merrick Garland were “clearly insufficient.”

“We need to pass statutes that can require a court review and authorization,” he insisted. “The courts didn’t even know that the Department of Justice was accessing emails and phone records of members of Congress and their staff, merely because they had access to classified information.”

“This is a grave constitutional violation.”

In Tuesday’s report, the inspector general noted that obtaining records without a warrant “risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch.”

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Source: David Edwards, rawstory.com/trump-doj-spying-on-congress/