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>https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/surveillance-court-demands-answers-from-fbi-for-errors-omissions-in-trump-campaign-investigation/2019/12/17/84c72754-210d-11ea-a153-dce4b94e4249_story.html
Surveillance court demands answers from FBI for errors, omissions in Trump campaign investigation
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered the government Tuesday to explain what the FBI will do to ensure the bureau does not mislead judges again when applying for surveillance orders like those used in the 2016 investigation of the Trump campaign.
The four-page order from Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, the presiding judge of the FISC, takes the FBI to task for 17 omissions and errors contained in applications to the court to secretly monitor the electronic communications of Carter Page, a former Trump adviser.
In a report released last week, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found serious failures in the FBI procedures for ensuring that its applications to the court are complete and accurate.
“When FBI personnel misled (the Justice Department) in the ways described above, they equally misled the FISC,” Collyer wrote. “The FBI’s handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the (inspector general) report, was antithetical to the heightened duty of candor” expected of FISC filings.
One of the issues exposed by the inspector general was that an FBI lawyer forwarded an altered email in 2017 to make it appear that Page was not a source for the CIA, when in fact Page had provided the agency information in the past.
That document alteration has been referred to a prosecutor for consideration of criminal charges. In the meantime, the FISC has ordered the Justice Department and FBI to provide information about any other surveillance applications in which that same attorney, Kevin Clinesmith, was involved.
“The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable,” Collyer wrote.
The reliability of FISC filings is considered critically important within the government, largely because the court’s work is so secretive that defense lawyers do not get to challenge the factual assertions behind such warrants.
Horowitz’s review of how the FBI investigated a possible conspiracy between Trump associates and Russia to influence the 2016 election concluded that the FBI had met the low legal threshold to open an investigation, but that the pursuit of Page as a suspected agent of the Russian government was plagued by errors, misstatements, and omissions.
As a result of his findings, Horowitz has already announced he will conduct a broader audit to see whether factual problems with FISC applications extend beyond the Page case. The Justice Department and the FBI submit applications to the FISC for the country’s most sensitive national security cases involving terrorism or espionage.
Collyer’s order requires the government to submit a sworn submission describing what it has done, and plans to do, “to ensure that the statement of facts in each FBI application accurately and completely reflects information possessed by the FBI that is material to any issue presented by the application.”
Even before the court’s rare public order, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray had announced his agency would make more than 40 changes to its internal procedures in order to prevent such errors and omissions in the future. President Trump has called the FBI a “badly broken” agency.