Washington Post: The US Department of Justice under Trump secretly received data on calls from three journalists of the publication who wrote about Russia

The US Department of Justice during the presidency of Donald Trump requested data on telephone conversations of three journalists from The Washington Post who wrote about Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. This is stated in the statement of the newspaper, published on May 7.

The publication learned about this from letters from the Ministry of Justice, which were received on May 3 by two current WP employees Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, as well as former newspaper reporter Adam Antus.

The letters stated that the Ministry received information about the calls of the mentioned journalists from work, home and mobile phones for the period from April 15 to July 31, 2017. The Ministry of Justice also unsuccessfully tried to obtain information about the electronic correspondence of journalists.

The letters of the Ministry of Justice do not specify what caused such actions. Toward the end of the period, three journalists released an article that in 2016, Donald Trump's adviser, Senator Jeff Sessions, discussed Russian-American relations with then-Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak in the event of Trump's victory in the presidential election. The authors of the note referred to the conversations of the ambassador with Moscow, intercepted by intelligence. At the time of publication of the article, Jeff Sessions was the U.S. Attorney General.

• Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated the "Russian case", concluded that Russia interfered in the US presidential election in 2016, but did not collude with Donald Trump and his campaign. Russia denied the intervention.