The Justice Department has agreed to return U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles’ personal cellphone that the FBI seized during a campaign-finance investigation, according to defense lawyers’ court filing, signaling the department is abandoning its probe. The FBI confiscated the Tennessee Republican’s phone in August 2024 to examine questions about his campaign finance reporting. The legal dispute centered on whether investigators could review the seized material and his personal email account. The phone seizure occurred after Ogles, a staunch Trump supporter, challenged the matter in court, and the case reached a point where a judge had not yet ruled on his challenge. In a Tuesday filing, defense attorneys disclosed that the Justice Department had voluntarily agreed to “promptly” return Ogles’ phone and to destroy the information it obtained from the device and from his Google email account. The filing said the destruction commitment covered both the contents from the phone and the email records. The campaign-finance investigation began under President Joe Biden and remained open after President Donald Trump took office, but it stalled while the government awaited a judge’s ruling on whether federal investigators could examine the phone and email. Ogles’ attorneys said the question of access to the digital evidence became the key obstacle to moving the case forward. The Justice Department’s criminal division previously concluded that the investigation should proceed, even as the matter faced procedural delays and changes among prosecutors. An email last July from a criminal division prosecutor urged Tennessee attorneys to reconsider after local prosecutors withdrew from the case, according to the account described in the reporting. At the time of the investigation’s earlier review and decision-making, the Justice Department’s criminal division was led by acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Galeotti, and later was led by Assistant Attorney General Tysen Duva. The reporting tied the decision to abandon the phone-and-email portion of the probe to ongoing judicial uncertainty over what investigators could examine. Ogles’ lawyers told the court they were notified of the agreement during discussions with the criminal division, now led by Duva. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to questions in the reporting about whether it was formally closing the Ogles investigation. Ogles said the development showed what he called proper limits on investigative authority. In a statement, he described the outcome as a “complete win for the responsible exercise of prosecutorial discretion and respect for the Constitution’s Separation of Powers,” and he added, “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,” characterizing the agreement as acknowledgement that he was “right.” The reporting also described Ogles’ account of the campaign-finance issue that prompted the investigation. Ogles previously reported making a $320,000 loan to his campaign committee in 2022, then amended his filings to show he had loaned the committee $20,000, saying he originally meant to “pledge” $320,000 but that the pledge figure had been mistakenly included in campaign reports. Even as the phone return and data-destruction agreement appears to end the seized-device portion of the case, Ogles remains facing a separate House Ethics Committee investigation, according to the reporting. The Justice Department’s broader actions against perceived political opponents have also drawn scrutiny, with the reporting placing the Ogles case within that wider context.