“The point here Martha is the court knew about all of this,” Nunes said. “I’m glad they’ve acted, I’m glad they said something, but the court needs to be ended,” he argued.
The California Republican voiced concern that neither the FBI and FISA judges can be trusted with powerful surveillance powers on Sunday as well, telling Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that the FISA court is in “tremendous jeopardy.”
“We cannot support the FISA court right now,” he said flatly. “The judges are refusing to take action against these dirty cops and dirty lawyers who did this.”
RIGHT SCOOP notes the case presented to Judge Collyer 2-and-a-half years ago explaining all that the IG Report just confirmed:
Mark Levin’s Landmark Legal Foundation filed a secret motion with the FISA court to act on application abuses all the way back in 2017, but just five days later the FISA court, via Judge Rosemary Collyer, denied their claim. Below is a statement from Mark Levin:
Over 2 1/2 years ago, a Landmark Legal Foundation asked Judge Collyer to act on the FBI abuses committed on the court and she denied our request. Now, she asserts she has the power to act. Better late than never, I guess, but the judge should have acted much earlier.
It just goes to show you how Landmark Legal was on this well before the OIG was ever asked to investigate the FISA abuses. Levin is right though, the FISA court should have acted then as some of this was known back in 2017…..
RIGHT SCOOP has the letter to the FBI. Devin Nunes had it right on Sunday…. shut down the FISA court!
Wow… finally! People were wondering why the FISA Court was so silent. Well, not any-longer….
A secretive surveillance court issued a rare public order on Tuesday rebuking the FBI for its handling of warrant applications to wiretap Carter Page, a onetime Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser whose monitoring by the government has become the subject of significant public controversy.
Judge Rosemary Collyer, the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, wrote in the filing that a recent Justice Department watchdog report was “troubling” and described the behavior of the FBI as “antithetical to the heightened duty of candor” owed to the court by government agents.
“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. THE FISC EXPECTS THE GOVERNMENT TO PROVIDE COMPLETE AND ACCURATE INFORMATION IN EVERY FILING WITH THE COURT,” JUDGE COLLYER WROTE.
The order could drastically reshape relations between the court and the Justice Department and could have ramifications for how some of the nation’s most sensitive intelligence programs are run. The court has long approved the overwhelming number of the government’s warrant applications and signed off on most of its surveillance activities, but in recent years it has begun to scrutinize them more closely. The rift over the matter of Mr. Page could heighten the court’s scrutiny of government surveillance.
Because of the nature of the court’s work in approving secret surveillance of people suspected of spying and terrorism, it operates in near total secrecy and rarely releases its filings or orders to the public.
The order follows the release earlier in December of a watchdog report that found serious lapses in the FBI’s handling of the warrant against Mr. Page. In the report, the Justice Department’s inspector general found that the FBI had withheld exculpatory material about Mr. Page from the court and made misleading statements about his relationship with another government agency.
Judge Collyer ordered the Justice Department to explain by Jan. 10 what steps it was taking to prevent such lapses in the future. The judge’s order also indicated it planned to release more secret material about the case in the coming weeks on its public docket, offering the possibility of additional insight into the government’s most secret surveillance programs…..
NEW: In response to the damning revelations in IG Horowitz’s report of FBI misconduct in the Carter Page FISA process, the FISA court issues a rare order to DOJ/FBI explain by Jan. 10 how it plans to make sure that such errors and omissions never happen again. h/t @MLevineReportspic.twitter.com/DA9euG2yk1
RIGHT SCOOP notes the case presented to Judge Collyer 2-and-a-half years ago:
Mark Levin’s Landmark Legal Foundation filed a secret motion with the FISA court to act on application abuses all the way back in 2017, but just five days later the FISA court, via Judge Rosemary Collyer, denied their claim. Below is a statement from Mark Levin:
Over 2 1/2 years ago, a Landmark Legal Foundation asked Judge Collyer to act on the FBI abuses committed on the court and she denied our request. Now, she asserts she has the power to act. Better late than never, I guess, but the judge should have acted much earlier.
It just goes to show you how Landmark Legal was on this well before the OIG was ever asked to investigate the FISA abuses. Levin is right though, the FISA court should have acted then as some of this was known back in 2017…..
RIGHT SCOOP has the letter to the FBI. Devin Nunes had it right on Sunday…. shut down the FISA court!
ALL of this — however — shows that way, way back in March 2017, Mark Levin had it right. Even the 4-people being spied on… all of it confirmed by the IG Report (more at OBAMAGATE):
Which all goes to support the idea that #NEVERTRUMPERS and the Left are chasing people to the media they despise (the media, BTW, that called this all along):
This is the entire issue regarding our Intelligence agencies… They abused the FISA Court warrant process. I was told that the Steele Dossier was only a small part of the warrant. For two years by Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Rosenstein, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, etc-etc. (BTW, the names represent Intel, the CIA, and the FBI). Turns out it was literally the only thing use as John Solomon, Kimberly Strassel, Sara Carter, Sean Hannity, Mollie Hemingway, Chuck Ross, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, etc — said. (MORE AT A PREVIOUS POST)
In an unprecedented move, the Department of Justice has released 412 pages of top-secret documents related to surveillance conducted against former Trump campaign chairman Carter Page.
The documents include an October 2016 application and three renewal applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants taken out against Page.
The New York Times and other news outlets obtained the applications through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
“The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government,” reads the FISA application.
“As discussed above, the FBI believes that Page has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government,” reads the initial FISA application, dated Oct. 21, 2016. The Justice Department and FBI obtained three additional FISAs in January, April and June 2017.
The application also says that the FBI had probable cause to believe that Page engaged in “clandestine intelligence activities” and is an agent of a foreign power.
[….]
The source appears to be Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier.
Steele also alleged in the dossier that Page worked with Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to exchange information with Russian operatives. Page has vehemently denied the dossier’s allegations, and says he has never spoken to Manafort. He also says he has never met Sechin and Diveykin while denying that he is a Russian agent.
FBI officials have told Congress that investigators had not corroborated the dossier’s allegations when it was cited in the FISA applications. But the FISA application shows that the FBI and Justice Department believed Steele to be a “reliable” source. Steele has been compensated for other work by the FBI, and his intelligence has been used in other criminal proceedings, the FISA application says….
And a clarification of the amount redacted of the released pages, LAW & CRIME:
…The warrant authorized surveillance of Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
National Security Attorney Bradley P. Moss, who pressed President Trump to make the documents public, told Law&Crime Saturday that he was not surprised to see so much of the document blacked out. The Department of Justice “was very cagey in their statements to the court about how the release would work… [t]hey clearly narrowed this only to the exact verbiage of what was disclosed by way of the Nunes/Schiff Memoranda, as well as any other open source information. Anything that was Government information was withheld as classified.”
Moss said that he “saw this coming 4 months ago,” which is why he and others “asked the President to intervene.”
“Whatever is in those redacted portions must have been good,” he added…
…The infamous “anti-Trump dossier” written by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele is the first piece of evidence against Page cited in the warrant. FBI officials have said they did not corroborate most of the dossier, nor did the FISA warrant request heavily rely on the unverified intelligence. However, the FISA warrant revealed the FBI believed the dossier to be “reliable.” They also used it to allege the meeting between Page and Diveykin.
The warrant against Page was renewed three times: in January 2017, April 2017, and June 2017. It ultimately expired in September 2017.
The unredacted portions of the original application and the three renewal applications are otherwise largely identical, so it is not visible whether the F.B.I. told the court that it was gaining useful intelligence from the wiretap of Mr. Page as it asked for extensions. But the length of the applications grew significantly each time, indicating that new information was being added: They were 66 pages, 79 pages, 91 pages and 101 pages, respectively.
The materials also revealed which Federal District Court judges signed off on the wiretapping of Mr. Page: Judges Rosemary Collyer, Michael Mosman, Anne C. Conway and Raymond J. Dearie. All were appointed by Republican presidents….
Remember, Comey, Yates, McCabe, and Rosenstein all signed off on misleading FISA extension of the Carter-Page spying [read here Trump] operation.
