Lawyers are supposed to have at least a cursory knowledge of the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, some of them don’t or know it and refuse to respect its limits. On Monday, Just the News posted an article about a blatant example of ignoring Constitution limits on searches and seizures or attorney-client privilege.

The article reports:

Unsealed court records reveal at least two Obama-appointed judges — often openly critical of President Trump — signed off on monitoring communications for top Trump aide Susie Wiles. Smith never disclosed to the judges that he was planning on spying on lawyers. The results tracked calls made to and from lawmakers, other lawyers and journalists.

The documents made public Monday by the White House Government Transparency Task Force include two applications by the former special counsel to use a pen register and a tap and trace device to monitor the incoming and outgoing calls of current White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s phone while she led Trump’s fundraising operation at the SAVE America PAC.

Pen register and tap and trace devices are used to gather private data on telephone calls, including when and where the calls were made, from whom to whom, and the length of the calls. While they do not include the actual contents of the calls, they often provide investigators with valuable information. 

Both applications came in winter and spring 2023 after Trump announced he was running for president and as Smith investigated allegations that the former president had mishandled classified documents after the conclusion of his first term. The filings are redacted, but an administration official told Just the News that Wiles was the subject of Smith’s requests. 

The article quotes Harvard University law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz:

Smith has testified he believes he did nothing wrong and would investigate and prosecute Trump the same way today, insisting no politics were involved in his decision-making.

Nonetheless, Dershowitz said the record of Smith’s tactics, which included tracking the lawmakers’ and defense lawyers’ phone records and the tracking of Trump’s wife and son’s travels, was troubling.

“Here we have a clear violation of expectations of privacy. When you make a phone call and you’re a lawyer, you do not expect the fact that you made that phone call to, say, a wiretap expert or a lie detector expert, or a witness. You don’t expect that the government will get access to that, and yet the government has access to who the defense attorneys called,” Dershowitz said.

“And that would give them a tremendous advantage in any case. It could give them the names of potential witnesses, and you know ultimately that would have to come out, but it wouldn’t have to come out at the time that this investigative tactic was being used,” he added. ” So I think there’s a lot of work to be done to make sure that expectations of privacy and civil liberties beyond the Constitution are adhered to.”

Where are the orange jumpsuits?