them to be told they can t disclose this. what happened, in this case, john, was that this nondisclosure order, this gag order, was extended three times, every year. and it wasn t until, just days before the biden administration comes into office that, it appears the justice department stops, essentially, responding to requests from apple. saying, do you still need this data? do you want us to keep this gag order? and it appears they just lost interest. and that s the reason why, today, you have this investigation from the inspector general, merrick garland, the attorney general. and deputy attorney general, lisa monaco, asked for this investigation to be done. because there, clearly, is some very some very unusual things about this. indeed. to say the least. thank you, evan perez, for your reporting. i appreciate it. thanks. joining us now, cnn political analyst and new york times washington correspondent, maggie haberman. also, cnn chief political analyst, gloria borger. gl
session about they see accusations? reporter: former attorney general barr is now distancing himself from these reports that the trump justice department was working to seize communications around a number of journalists and at least two congressmen looking into then president trump, and we have confirmation from eric swalwell as well as adam schiff that they were targeted, but and as you know, the top senate democrats are calling to subpoena former attorneys general william barr as well as jeff sessions to testify about these investigations, but we re also getting new details from apple as they start to explain what happened, saying that the doj under president trump was scud to turn over metadata on phone number and e-mail addressing. apple said a nondisclosure order
the inception of the accounts, all the way to the present time when they received the subpoena. the subpoena was received in february of 2018. again, that is an extremely broad request for all kinds of data about who these the owners of these accounts were communicating with. and what apple said as you mentioned, they not only got the subpoena, they also got a nondisclosure order, a gag order, which said they could not disclose this to the customers and renewed it for three years before just before president biden took office. suddenly it appeared that the justice department lost interest. we also heard from microsoft saying that they received a request from the justice department as well for data belonging to a congressional staffer. in the case of apple, we know that at least two members of congress, we also know staffers and some of their family members, including one teenager, was part of this request. so, you know, it s pretty