The Department of Justice has dropped thousands of criminal cases in order to aid and abet Donald Trump’s agenda—and now it seems to be on the verge of assisting some of the president’s allies.
The DOJ seems to be preparing to end a nearly two-year probe into Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles, WTVF reported Tuesday. The agency has so far returned his phone and destroyed the evidence they collected from it, according to the Tennessee Lookout.
The update came by way of a legal motion from Ogles’s team, nixing a long-pending emergency motion that had prevented federal authorities from reviewing evidence on his phone and email.
“In discussions with the Office of the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice, the Government has advised defense counsel that it will promptly return or destroy the property obtained pursuant to the respective search warrants at issue,” the motion read. “The emergency motions filed by Congressman Ogles in these matters are therefore moot.”
Ogles’s phone was seized by the FBI shortly after his 2024 primary win, but the investigation was related to discrepancies that appeared in his 2022 election, when he filed a campaign finance report claiming that he loaned his campaign $320,000. The detail raised alarm bells in 2024, when Ogles filed another campaign finance report to acknowledge that he had only loaned the campaign $20,000.
The following year, a U.S House Congressional Ethics panel found “substantial reason to believe” that Ogles had violated federal campaign finance laws by inflating his offices’ fundraising via a personal loan.
The lawmaker’s legal defense claimed that the FBI—as a component of the executive branch—had no right to look at the personal communications of a sitting member of the legislative branch.
“From the day the FBI showed up, I said this investigation should never have happened and that the Biden DOJ had no right to rummage through a sitting congressman’s legislative communications,” Ogles said in a press release. “I’m grateful to the Trump Justice Department for righting this wrong.”
But a wrapped DOJ investigation isn’t the end of Ogles’s legal woes: The House Ethics panel is still investigating him.