James Comey, Other U.S. Officials Sued by Former Intelligence Contractor

[This article was updated to include more background information on Dennis Montgomery.]

A former intelligence contractor has filed a lawsuit against former FBI Director James Comey and other U.S. officials for allegedly covering up evidence showing widespread illegal surveillance on Americans, Circa reports.

The contractor, Dennis Montgomery, said he left his job with over 600 million classified documents stored on some 47 hard drives from the NSA and the CIA which he says prove the illicit surveillance took place, possibly a larger quantity of documents than Edward Snowden obtained in his now-infamous 2013 breach.

The suit was filed on Monday and was assigned to a federal judge who has already ruled against some of the NSA’s surveillance practices, concluding in a separate case that the agency’s collection of Americans’ data has violated the Fourth Amendment.

Montgomery says he provided evidence to the FBI which showed warrantless surveillance on American phone, financial and personal data, as well as the unmasking of identities of millions of American citizens. He has since returned the purloined hard drives to the FBI.

“This domestic surveillance was all being done on computers supplied by the FBI,” Montgomery said in an interview with Circa. “So these supercomputers, which are FBI computers, the CIA is using them to do domestic surveillance.”

The former contractor claims the NSA and CIA unmasked over 20 million Americans while searching through credit reports, emails, Internet traffic and phone conversations. Montgomery’s lawyer, Larry Klayman, alleges Montgomery’s evidence proves the agencies spied on figures ranging from American judges to President Trump himself.

“Can you imagine what someone can do with the information they were collecting on Americans, can you imagine that kind of power?” Montgomery asked.

In the suit, Montgomery says he gave the FBI information that pointed to a “pattern and practice of conducting illegal, unconstitutional surveillance against millions of Americans, including prominent Americans such as the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, other justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen, and others such as Donald J. Trump, as well as Plaintiffs themselves.”

“Plaintiffs were assured that the FBI, under Defendant Comey, would conduct a full investigation into the grave instances of illegal and unconstitutional activity set forth by Montgomery. However, the FBI, on Defendant Comey’s orders, buried the FBI’s investigation because the FBI itself is involved in an ongoing conspiracy to not only conduct the aforementioned illegal, unconstitutional surveillance, but to cover it up as well,” the suit continued.

This comes on the heels of another revelation that shed light on additional illegal NSA spying under the Obama administration.

President Trump has proposed changes to surveillance procedures that have been approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts. The change would limit the NSA’s ability to conduct database searches using identifier terms related to American citizens.

Circa’s Sara Carter, one of two reports who broke the Montgomery story, told Sean Hannity that the lawsuit against Comey is “absolutely” on a “much larger scale” than the ongoing Russiagate scandal.

Montgomery has been at the heart of several prior scandals, including allegations that he was behind a faulty software system that was supposed to track terrorists. In at least one instance, information derived from Montgomery’s software led to a national “code orange” security alert which grounded international flights. Journalist James Risen would describe that as “one of the most elaborate and dangerous hoaxes in American history.”

Montgomery would sue Risen for defamation over that claim, but his lawsuit was dismissed.

The former contractor also accused 2006 Nevada gubernatorial candidate Jim Gibbons of accepting bribes while serving in Congress. An 18-month FBI investigation cleared Gibbons on the charges and the case never went anywhere.