A judge on the FISA court has criticized the FBI’s abuses of the FISA court in a stunning rebuke of the law enforcement agency.
According to Town Hall:
A judge on this secretive FISA court, which approves these surveillance warrants, torched the FBI as well, calling into question all of the warrants that were sought against Page. She also demanded that a detailed plan to ensure this never happens again is put forward by January 10 (via 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.
[…]“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.”
2) Courts have the ability to discipline those who undermine the integrity of a court’s functions. They can even appoint special investigators. Is the court not curious if this behavior happened in other warrants? And if court-imposed sanction isn’t relevant here, when is it?
— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) December 17, 2019
The red flags raised by the errors contained in the dossier would have certainly left in doubt whether the warrants would have been signed or not.
