administrative subpoena Archives

Photo Credit: APRepublican Rep. Darrell Issa issued subpoenas Tuesday for a host of State Department emails and other communications on the Benghazi terror attack, signaling that the Obama administration’s recent document dump would not satisfy congressional investigators.

Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, claimed in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry that the department is still “withholding documents.”

He demanded the department release more on the administration’s behind-the-scenes discussions, in the days after the attack, on how they would describe the strike. These documents have since become known as the “Benghazi talking points.”

“The State Department has not lived up to the administration’s broad and unambiguous promises of cooperation with Congress. Therefore, I am left with no alternative but to compel the State Department to produce relevant documents through a subpoena,” Issa wrote to Kerry.

Read more from this story HERE.

When Golden Valley Electric Association of rural Alaska got an administrative subpoena from the Drug Enforcement Administration in December 2010 seeking electricity bill information on three customers, the company did what it usually does with subpoenas — it ignored them.

That’s the association’s customer privacy policy, because administrative subpoenas aren’t approved by a judge.

But by law, utilities must hand over customer records — which include any billing and payment information, phone numbers and power consumption data — to the DEA without court warrants if drug agents believe the data is “relevant” to an investigation. So the utility eventually complied, after losing a legal fight earlier this month.

Meet the administrative subpoena: With a federal official’s signature, banks, hospitals, bookstores, telecommunications companies and even utilities and internet service providers — virtually all businesses — are required to hand over sensitive data on individuals or corporations, as long as a government agent declares the information is relevant to an investigation. Via a wide range of laws, Congress has authorized the government to bypass the Fourth Amendment — the constitutional guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that requires a probable-cause warrant signed by a judge.

In fact, there are roughly 335 federal statutes on the books passed by Congress giving dozens upon dozens of federal agencies the power of the administrative subpoena, according to interviews and government reports.

Posts

Issa Subpoenas State Department for Benghazi Documents

We Don’t Need No Stinking Warrant: The Disturbing, Unchecked Rise of the Administrative Subpoena