Donald Trump Jr speaks at the Republican National Convention on Monday, Aug. 24, 2020 (RNC video screenshot)
The State Department ordered employees to monitor the social-media accounts of 13 prominent Americans during the early days of the Ukraine scandal in 2019, according to State Department memos made public Tuesday.
Some of the names include Donald Trump Jr., former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, reported John Solomon of Just the News, who confirms he was among those targeted.
It was officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev who ordered the monitoring and later were told that their activities potentially violated the Privacy Act.
The memos were released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the government watchdog Judicial Watch.
Emails show the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine at the time, Marie Yovanovitch, and a top deputy, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, were told about the program.
Marie Yovanovitch
The subjects that were targeted included "social media posts involving the ambassador, liberal megadonor George Soros, and the controversy around Joe Biden and Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company engulfed in a corruption controversy that hired the vice president's son Hunter in 2014," the report said.
"Key thing is to get up to ramming speed from the get go," Kent wrote in a March 27, 2019, email.
The efforts "appear to have been prompted by early stories about the embassy's activities with Ukrainian prosecutors and the Bidens at The Hill newspaper (written by this reporter) and on Fox News," Solomon reported.
Laura Ingraham
The original documentation was posted online.
The report said the embassy apparently was told to stop the monitoring by April 1, 2019.
In an email, a redacted Digital Media Associate for EUR/PD Keniya-Trusant Group advised the State Department of the legal issues related to monitoring social media.
"Going to chime in here — so regarding the influencers, there are some legal implications of making a list of Facebook influencers of Twitter influencers since they are technically private citizens (even though they're publicly on the internet) and we cannot compile them into a list and monitor what they are saying using a third-party application without their knowledge," the email read. "To see what they're saying, you unfortunately need to use the old school way and manually go to their feeds and view that way. Cumbersome but it's in compliance with the Privacy Act of 1974."
Just the News said Amanda Milius, a former State Department senior adviser, said it was "hard to believe" that officials at the time were not aware of the requirements of the Privacy Act.
Judicial Watch's president, Tom Fitton, who also was on the list, described it as an "enemies list." He pointed out the bureaucracy "hid these smoking gun documents for months."
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