On Friday night the Bannon Defense team made claims that Chris Wray’s FBI was secretly spying on his defense attorney since last year.
The Bannon team alleged the FBI quietly got his Attorney Robert J. Costello’s phone records and emails. This is a rare move in American law but something we are accustomed to with this corrupt and politicized Department of Justice. In recent years the DOJ has been targeting conservatives on phony crimes such as the Trump-Russia hoax, something they knew was a lie back in 2016. At the same time, the DOJ ignores obvious criminal activity by Democrat politicians and their families, the Biden Crime Family, for years now.
The Daily Beast reported:
Bannon’s legal team got the evidence last month but made the revelations in court filings Friday evening, calling it “outrageous and inappropriate government conduct.”
“The undersigned counsel were shocked to learn, upon accessing these documents, that almost all of the documents reflected efforts by the government to obtain telephone records and email records from the personal and professional accounts of defense counsel, Robert J. Costello, Esquire,” Bannon’s legal team wrote.
These kinds of spy tactics are sure to raise public concern, because prosecutors don’t usually spy on a target’s own lawyer. The court filings allege that prosecutors started getting the records they’d requested just a week after Bannon was indicted on criminal contempt charges in November for refusing to testify before the congressional panel, which is examining the circumstances of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building last year.
The Justice Department seemed to have acknowledged engaging in that surveillance in a letter it wrote to that legal team on Jan. 7 this year, when it said Costello is “a witness to the conduct charged in the indictment,” ostensibly because he had been advising Bannon not to talk to the committee. Bannon refused for weeks, claiming that former President Donald Trump had retained some sort of “executive privilege” leftover from his time at the White House—a bogus legal theory that was rejected by a federal judge, an appellate panel, and ultimately didn’t sway the Supreme Court.
In the letter to Bannon’s legal team, federal prosecutor Amanda R. Vaughn let them know that the Justice Department also considers another lawyer who was giving Bannon advice, Adam Katz, a witness.
FBI agents tried to get incoming and outgoing phone call logs and records showing who Costello texted, according to Bannon’s side.
If this is true they would have had to have a warrant to spy on Attorney Robert Costella.
On Friday Steve Bannon filed a motion to compel discovery. According to Steve Bannon and his attorneys, he is entitled to the disclosure of information that shows the bias of any of individual who set in motion his criminal prosecution, and information tending to show that this prosecution is politically motivated.
Attorney for Steve Bannon B… by Jim Hoft
Here is a Document from the FBI on Costello from November 2021.
Bannon’s Legal Team Says Chris Wray’s FBI Was Secretly Spying on His Defense Attorney by Jim Hoft on Scribd