FISA Court itself has just taken the rare step of publically reprimanding the FBI and calling into question EVERY warrant obtained from the FISA Court.
It looks to me like the FISA court wants nothing to do with this mess and is distancing itself from the FBI.
Look:
From the Federalist:
The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court harshly rebuked the FBI in a Tuesday afternoon order, saying FBI misconduct in applying for warrants against Trump campaign official Carter Page calls all past warrant applications into question, and setting a fast-approaching deadline to fix the system.
The order was issued in response to an inspector general report that found the FBI failed to include exculpatory evidence in its four succesful applications for surveillance warrants on U.S. citizen, former Naval officer, and then-Trump campaign official Carter Page. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is a secret court set up in 1978 to grant U.S. intelligence agencies warrants to spy on suspected spies from other countries, or, literally, to surveil foreign intelligence.
“This order,” FISC Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote at the top of the four-page document, “responds to reports that personnel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) provided false information to the National Security Division (NSD) of the Department of Justice, and withheld material information from NSD which was detrimental to the FBI’s case, in connection with four applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for authority to conduct electronic surveillance of a U.S. citizen named Carter W. Page.”
“The frequency with which representations FBI personnel made to the court turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case,” Judge Collyer continued, “calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable.”
The document orders the government to, by Jan. 10, “inform the Court in a sworn written submission of 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.”
If the FBI is unable to comply, the court concludes, the FBI must explain why the order has not been implemented, what steps it is taken to meet the order, the timetable to meet the order, and “why… the information in FBI applications submitted in the interim should be regarded as reliable.”
The court rarely issues public statements, indicating the gravity of this scandal. While demanding the FBI reform its processes, which it described in harsh language, however, the court did not suggest any penalties for those responsible for the offenses.
In his 434-page report issued Dec. 9, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz identified 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the Page investigation, adding in a follow-up Senate hearing on Dec. 11 that the FBI “was misleading to the court.”
Three days before the report was publicly released, FBI Director Christopher Wray wrote a letter saying he was ordering “more than 40 corrective steps to address the Report’s recommendations,” summarizing those in five points. Wray’s letter was released the day the report was.
The Team over at DanBongino had more on the story:
The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued a strong rebuke of the FBI’s handling of Carter Page’s surveillance application process and has given the bureau a January 10 deadline to come up with solutions, according to Fox News.
The rare public order from presiding judge Rosemary M. Collyer states, “This order responds to reports that personnel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) provided false information to the National Security Division (NSD) of the Department of Justice, and withheld material information from NSD which was detrimental to the FBI’s case, in connection with four applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for authority to conduct electronic surveillance of a U. S. citizen named Carter W. Page,” Collyer wrote.
The order continues, “The FBI’s handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the [Office of Inspector General] report, was antithetical to the heightened duty of candor described above. 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 special order comes days after the release of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report which uncovered 17 “significant errors or omissions” in the FBI’s FISA applications for Carter Page.
UPDATE: The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross points out that Rep. Mark Meadows asked Collyer last year to review the FBI’s FISA applications, however she claimed in today’s order that the court was unaware of the FBI’s omissions until the release of the IG report:
In the October, 2018 letter Meadows wrote, “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. We write to encourage you to investigate the possibility that FISA has recently been weaponized for political means.”
And don't forget this:
Our President reacts:
You can read the full order here:
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