The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Saturday released heavily-redacted documents related to the surveillance warrants on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. This is a key part of the federal investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia.
The documents show the FBI lied. They also presented circular evidence reliant on the unverified dossier. The warrant gave the FBI permission to spy “incidentally” on anyone in the Trump campaign.
There are 412 pages including the initial application and several renewals, but it whittles down to very little because of the redactions. The President released the documents despite objections from the FBI. He should now order the declassification. These docs do not appear to reveal sources and methods. Rather, the material is embarrassing or worse to certain FBI officials.
Two of the four judges who rubber-stamped the illegal FISA surveillance warrants are U.S. Judge Anne C. Conway [appointed to FISC 2016] and U.S. Judge Raymond J. Dearie [appointed 2012 to FISC].
The warrants were signed by Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe and Sally Yates. They approved spying on the Trump campaign. It is unheard of.
THE FBI FALSELY CLAIMED THE EVIDENCE WAS VERIFIED
The document on page 53 says the FBI “verified the application for accuracy in accordance with its April 5, 2001 procedures…”. That is a lie. It was never verified.
According to the documents, the FBI relied on the dossier. Hillary’s campaign and the DNC commissioned the dossier as opposition research. It was put together by Steele subcontractors. They got it from Russian spies who took it from the Russian rumor mill.
“The FBI takes seriously its obligations to the FISA Court and its compliance with procedures overseen by career professionals in the Department of Justice and the FBI,” the FBI said in its statement at the time.
Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, said his first read of the documents released by the DOJ on Saturday seemed to “confirm the FBI and DoJ misled the courts in withholding information about Clinton-DNC being behind the information used to get the FISA warrant.”
“Given this corruption, President Trump should intervene and declassify the heavily redacted material,” he continued in a statement.
THE FBI WAS ALLOWED TO SPY ON PAGE, AND “INCIDENTALLY” SPY ON OTHERS IN THE CAMPAIGN
The documents show the FBI wiretapped Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy adviser. They said he “was recruited by and conspiring with the Russian government”.
Carter Page has never been charged or even arrested.
The materials include an October 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap Page as well as three 90-day renewal applications.
The first three applications were signed by then-FBI Director James Comey, and the fourth by his deputy Andrew McCabe, after Trump fired Comey in May of 2017.
It showed the FBI believed or said they believed Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government.
The FISA documents gave the FBI the authority to “INCIDENTALLY acquire other information” against additional targets while monitoring Page, a Trump campaign adviser.
In one section, it states the FBI believes the Russian Government’s efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election were being coordinated with Carter Page and perhaps other individuals associated with [Trump’s] campaign”. That would include George Papadopoulos.
THE DOSSIER IS THE FIRST PIECE OF EVIDENCE CITED
The dossier is the first piece of evidence cited in the FISA application section laying out the allegations that Page coordinated with Russian government officials on election-related “influence activities.” The FBI has said they did not rely on the dossier.
That section cites information from “Source #1” who alleged that during a trip to Moscow in July 2016, Page met secretly with two sanctioned Kremlin insiders, Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin, as part of a collusion scheme involving the Trump campaign.
The source is Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier.
The documents show that the FBI revealed in a footnote that ‘Source #1’, as it refers to Steele, had been hired by an opposing campaign to dig dirt on the Trump campaign, but noted he had a history of providing ‘reliable information’ to the FBI.
There is NO OTHER EVIDENTIARY source [Source #1] other than the dossier.
The renewal applications include a footnote in bold saying that the FBI had severed its relationship with Steele because he had shared some of his claims with a news organization in October 2016.
That organization is likely Yahoo News. The article in Yahoo was from the same source — Steele — and meant to bolster his other creation — the dossier.
THE SAME EVIDENCE WAS PRESENTED FROM SEVERAL SOURCES BUT PRESENTED AS CORROBORATING EVIDENCE — BRENNAN AND REID WERE INVOLVED
In other words, it makes it clear that FBI bought into the wild accusations and unsubstantiated claims of Clinton’s spy — Steele. Furthermore, they even pretended they didn’t know the “Western intelligence source” in the Yahoo article was Steele.
Over and over, the newly released FISA application on Carter Page reveals the FBI cited liberal media articles, along with the Clinton-paid political dossier, as evidence to support the warrant to spy on Page, and by extension, the Trump campaign.
In other words, Tom Fitton writes, the FISA documents cite the Clinton-DNC Dirty Dossier, the leak of the Dossier to the media, and leak of the Dossier information through Democrat Senator Harry Reid as different pieces of evidence to get court approval to spy on Trump’s campaign team.
“Senate Minority Leader” Harry Reid’s 2016 letter to Comey is actually cited in the FISA warrant as “evidence” to spy on the campaign. In other words, it cites information Reid got from John Brennan who got it from the Clinton dossier. That is certainly circular evidence.
STRZOK APPEARS TO HAVE COMMITTED PERJURY
It shows lead investigator — the biased Peter Strzok — did in fact use Carter Page’s September 2016 letter to Jim Comey as a “pretext” to open the investigation on him. Strzok suggested as much in email to Lisa Page in September, labeled Re:”Crossfire FISA.” However, Strzok testified this month he had nothing to do with the Page FISA application.
While Strzok didn’t actually write the actual applications, a “Supervisory Special Agent” under him did. Strzok can’t claim ignorance. There are ten steps for each of the four FISA applications for a total of forty. It’s not believable that he was unaware.
The FBI claimed the dossier sent in different forms were multiple pieces of evidence. It all came from the same Dossier — circular evidence.
THE FISA COURT DIDN’T KNOW IT CAME FROM HILLARY
The FISA court never knew the requests came from a ‘dossier’ created by Fusion GPS as agents of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. The first warrant to spy on Carter Page came only weeks before the 2016 election.
If Hillary had won that election, we would never have known any of this. Innocent people might have been imprisoned [remember the videographer accused of causing the Benghazi attack].
It corroborates the Republican memo detailing how the “minimally corroborated” Clinton-DNC dossier was an essential part of the FBI and DOJ’s applications for surveillance warrants to spy on Page.
Carter Page Wiretapping by M Mali on Scribd
There are “self-contradictions” in this FISA warrant.
a. The target of this application is an agent of a foreign power.
The following describes the foreign power and sets forth in detail a description of the target and the target’s activities for or on behalf of this foreign power. Carter Page “knowingly” engage in clandestine intelligence activities… and therefore IS an agent of a foreign power.
Fine. He’s a definite foreign agent for Russia.
Now, “This application targets Carter Page. The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian Government.
Wait. What. He was “knowingly” a foreign agent. Or was he being “recruited” as a foreign agent.
If THIS is typical of the FISC system, and, in conjunction with Intelligence it is certainly evidence that the current system is lacking in many ways. To put it mildly, this is an “embarrassment” to all those involved. It is NO wonder why so many occasions the Government has “failed” in “knowing” what happened. It’s one thing for Congress to “rely” on some news report for oversight but to have the “prestigious” Agencies “rely” on news reports says a great deal.
I suspect the continuation of warrants during the transition and afterwards are based upon the RNC platform and associated details.
This is ludicrous since any Candidate can have any policy he so desires. THAT is our Constitutional Republic system, whether any side objects or not.
THEN, there’s Lindsey Graham who actually put forth that Trump Should NOT be “allowed” to meet with any Russian “in private”. There can be NO greater violations of Separation of Powers than this. It has SO many unintended consequences that such an Idiot as Graham could never imagine.
Before anyone gets too anxious remember this was a FOIA request by Judicial Watch for public consumption. FOIA requests can be redacted with more stringent means. This release will allow Congress to force more redactions removed, whereas DOJ could have continued to thwart Congress.
This document is a disgrace to all those involved. The wording suggest a conclusion that Page “Is a foreign agent” at the very beginning. To me, there is a contradiction with the Russian hacking narrative and this document compounds that. I read once that maybe the FBI didn’t know its right hand from its left, and this seems to reflect that. The warrant mentions the case against the Russians along with Carter Page. Nowhere is it, that I could find, that even hinted Page was an “Informant” FOR the FBI. It appears THAT case was used against him, with clear indications he was coordinating with Russia to influence the election. Is that case and its evidence what is redacted.
It says, based upon “scope and sensitivity” Intelligence believes emails from US persons show methods and motivations consistent with Russian efforts. Is our Intelligence that ignorant of all things Russia. If this is SO important and sensitive why did Russia employ the GRU rather than SVR to do the work. The SVR is the more sophisticated branch in these operations. The GRU would be tasked with operations more in line with trolling and ad buys.
Notice that this warrant deals with “emails” and Not DNC documents hosted at NGP-VAN. The “email hack” was a simple phishing attack that Podesta was told to go ahead with when he questioned its authenticity. A “sophisticated” attack would never use phishing but methods more subtle and hidden. The purported Guccifer 2.0 attacks didn’t deal with emails but were DNC documents from NGP-VAN, according to the postings on Twitter. Very little was reported on these documents, but the media has mixed the two events, and it appears, so has Intelligence.
Here, we can understand “why” Nunes is getting deeply involved in the State Department. This is where the revelation of Page had begun, according to the warrant, which is odd since all reports suggested it began with Steele and contacts to the FBI.
The subs sources are quite interesting because there were no reports until now that Steele used others. The implications were he spoke “directly” with his previous contacts in Russia.
There was also much made about the supposed RNC platform and Ukraine, which did get some press later on, and subsequently debunked. It is worded in such a way to say a majority of “Party 1” disagreed with Trump on this and other matters. No Kidding. There were many, now known as NeverTrumpers, who didn’t want Candidate 1 to win and openly supported Hillary. Russia was an excuse when everything else failed, as it was with Democrats. This shows the entire warrant to be more of a political document and some valid warrant.
There is one little bit of information that many may be overlooking which relates to Rogers of the NSA. In that previous case of unmasking that Mike Rogers exposed the different departments had to Certify “Minimization Procedures” had to be drawn up and enforced, including Storage, Access and Review of FISA acquired information. Privileged communications involving targets and other persons not charged with a crime. Restrictions and rententions etc of Ad Hoc Databases. Training on this shall be ensured by the Attorney General and was signed by Loretta Lynch. There are quite a bit of redactions in that section.
Bu, but, but Liddle Marco says all is fine over at the FBI?