Two years ago this month, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) issued a warrant authorizing the FBI to spy on Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to President Trump. The stated suspicion was the nominee’s campaign was colluding with Russia.
The issuance of a so-called FISA warrant was momentous and unprecedented, permitting a Democratic-run Justice Department to obtain communications inside the duly-elected GOP nominee’s campaign during its final weeks before the election.
Since that time, we have learned much about the evidence — or lack thereof — that supported the warrant.
We know, for example, the primary evidence was a dossier created by British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, but the court wasn’t told his work was directly paid for by Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party.
Instead, the FBI used this footnote in its warrant application to describe who hired Steele: “The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit” the Trump campaign. That’s hardly complete or forthcoming.
We also know that when the Steele dossier was submitted, it had not been fully vetted for accuracy, despite a requirement that all FISA evidence be verified. Some of the dossier’s claims later were found to be inaccurate.
We’ve painfully learned of blatant bias inside the investigation. Steele told senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr he was desperate to keep Trump from being elected president. Two of the FBI’s leads on the case, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, were having an affair and texting each other about finding “an insurance policy” designed to “stop” Trump.
The FBI lovebirds even communicated they were applying “hurry the F up” pressure to try to rush the FISA warrant through the court before Election Day.
We recently learned that the FBI’s initial justification for opening the Trump-Russia collusion case — the belief that another campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, might have colluded with Moscow — quickly fell apart when Papadopoulos told an FBI informant he didn’t collude and would consider such activity treasonous.
Finally, the House intelligence committee dug up evidence that Steele and the FBI engaged in leaks with the news media about the Russia investigation, then used some of those articles to support its FISA application. That is a practice known as circular intelligence, where single-source reporting is made to look multi-sourced.
There are more exculpatory pieces of evidence I could detail but these alone make a compelling case that the initial FBI and DOJ representations to the court were, at best, flawed and, at worst, desperately biased and driven by an election clock.
And that begs the question: What do the FISC judges and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, the ultimate judicial disciplinarian, think about what happened?
After all, the FISC issued not one but four warrants allowing the FBI to monitor Page for nearly nine months into Trump’s presidency.
This week, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the conservative firebrand who, along with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), has driven the once reluctant House leaders to dig for much of the aforementioned evidence, sent his own missive to U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer. She is chief judge of the FISC.
His letter asked the obvious question: As a separate and equal pillar of government from Congress and the executive branch, does the judiciary have concerns with the FBI’s and DOJ’s conduct?
“Based on our investigation and open source information, the FISC may have not lived up to the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures in approving U.S. citizens targeted without probable cause,” Meadows wrote. “We write to encourage you to investigate the possibility that FISA has recently been weaponized for political means.”
More:
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/413854-silence-of-the-lambs-the-deafening-quietude-of-the-fisa-court-and-john