State Dept. officials told they broke law by monitoring Americans during Ukraine scandal

[PeteS in CA]

State Dept. officials told they broke law by monitoring Americans during Ukraine scandal

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/state-dept-officials-told-they-broke-law-monitoring

State Department officials were explicitly ordered in spring 2019 to stop tracking 13 prominent Americans' social media accounts for information about the Joe Biden-Ukraine scandal because the monitoring violated federal law, according to emails that were originally redacted to hide the concerns from the American public.

"We are barred by law from actively monitoring the accounts of American citizens in aggregate — and particularly from identifying and monitoring individual, selected accounts," a State Department official wrote in an April 1, 2019 email to officials in Washington and the U.S. embassy in Kiev

The unredacted emails, obtained by Just the News, raise new questions about the accuracy of State Department officials' testimony during President Trump's impeachment proceedings. They also provide a window into how the department used redactions in a Freedom of Information Act case to hide the potentially explosive information just weeks before Election Day 2020.