Recent news that federal authorities were tracking the cellphones of several U.S. senators has punched all the wrong buttons for Josh Hawley.
"They traced my outgoing calls, my incoming calls, my location, the duration of the call," Hawley said in an interview with the Post-Dispatch.
Hawley said a special counsel should be appointed to investigate the situation.
"There needs to be total transparency," Hawley said.
Mistakenly referred to as "tapping" when the issue was disclosed last week at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, the FBI just compiled basic call information without tapping into the actual content of conversations.
Hawley and the other Republicans were part of a group planning to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election, in which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump. After the voting was disrupted by rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, the FBI began investigating the incident.
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Hawley points out, however, that the phone-tracing list was not compiled until mid-2023.
According to PBS, the FBI document revealing the phone-tracking did not say how or why those specific senators were identified or whether any meaningful tips or leads emerged.
The seven other GOP U.S. senators on the phone-trace list were Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee; Lindsey Graham, South Carolina; Bill Hagerty, Tennessee; Ron Johnson, Wisconsin; Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming; Dan Sullivan, Alaska; and Tommy Tuberville, Alabama. U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pennsylvania, also was listed.
A probe into legislators' phone records is not unprecedented.
In 2017, prosecutors under Trump's first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, issued subpoenas to Apple to turn over evidence concerning news reports about alleged contact between Russia and associates of Trump.
The two targets were Democratic U.S. Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, both of California. The Biden White House called the action "appalling."
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