Free Republic

The House’s top investigator on Sunday said the FBI failed to notify a surveillance court it was relying on material funded by Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign when it asked to snoop on an adviser tied to the Trump campaign. Rep. Trey Gowdy, South Carolina Republican and chairman of the House Oversight Committee, also said judges wouldn’t have authorized and repeatedly renewed a warrant to spy on the former Trump aide, Carter Page, if it hadn’t been for that very material, compiled by investigator Christopher Steele in a controversial dossier. “They could have easily said it was the DNC...

The Nunes Memo confirms that the basis for the FISA warrants to spy on Trump associates was the Steele “dossier,” paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton. The Memo reveals that the FBI also paid for it. The persons who signed the FISA applications are James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Rod Rosenstein, and Dana Boente. The Memo confirms that the political origins of the Steele Dossier, that it was bought and paid for by Hillary and the DNC, were not disclosed to the FISA court. The legal standard for a search warrant was stated by the Supreme Court...

House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff had a very different message for Russians in 2013 than he has for Americans today.Then, he was advocating for more transparency when it came to the U.S. government spying on Americans and foreigners.Today, not so much.During a 2013 appearance on RT, which is controlled by the Russian government, Schiff said we wanted more transparency, which RT characterized as efforts to “inject more oversight into the NSA’s surveillance programs and the top secret FISA court.”The RT anchor introduced Schiff as “one of those members of Congress leading the effort.”In July 2013, Schiff told the...

A FISA court judge has grounds to hold Department of Justice officials including Bruce Ohr in contempt of court for making misrepresentations about the sources of information used to obtain a surveillance warrant against a Trump associate, a former judge and Republican congressman said.

On the same day the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released the Nunes memo showing the FBI relied on the salacious and unverified Trump dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant on Carter Page, a federal judge ruled to withhold the Comey memos. The memos, authored by former FBI Director James Comey, are about his nine private conversations with President-elect and President Trump. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ruled in favor of the FBI’s request to keep the Comey memos secret, also sits on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The FISA Court is the same court that approved the...

The word is getting out. People are slowing beginning to piece together the BIGGER STORY of what fundamentally lies behind the Obama administration’s 2016 use of FISA 702(16)(17) surveillance, and how an the intentional non-oversight of the Department of Justice National Security Division was used in the construct of the unlawful FBI surveillance and spying operation against presidential candidate Donald Trump. During a radio interview on WMAL legal analyst and former U.S. Attorney General for Washington DC, Joe DiGenova, specifically highlights the DOJ National Security Division head John P Carlin and his role in the 2016 FISA warrant. Other than...

GOP senators request criminal investigation of Trump dossier author © Greg Nash Two Republican senators are asking the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation into Christopher Steele, the author of a controversial research opposition dossier on President Trump. Sens. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.) sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray asking that they investigate if the former MI6 agent lied to federal authorities. "I don’t take lightly making a referral for criminal investigation. But, as I would with any credible evidence of a crime unearthed in the course...

In the shifting saga of how members of the Trump campaign/administration ended up having their phone conversations tapped under the Obama administration, the American people have been fed a series of shifting excuses on how the Obama administration would never violate the laws concerning surveillance of US Persons. We were told the President cannot order such surveillance (which we know is a false statement, see here and here). Then we were given the impression by the Fake News Media these “intercepts” were under a FISA court warrant. But later we learned the FISA court rejected the application by Team Obama...

Everyone suspected the sketchy Steele Dossier was what corrupt FBI and DOJ officials used to get the October 2016 FISA warrant against Trump. FBI and DOJ officials refuse to answer that question publicly. Despite a hundred different ways congressional investigators have asked the question, and despite numerous on-camera questions to FBI and DOJ officials about the 2016 FISA process, no-one had definitively confirmed the Christopher Steele ‘Russian Dossier’ was the underlying evidence for the 2016 FISA application to gain wiretaps and electronic surveillance upon presidential candidate Donald Trump. UNTIL NOW. Senator Lindsey Graham just confirmed the sketchy Steele Dossier was...

Last Thursday it was announced that U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras was mysteriously recused from the Special Counsel case against General Mike Flynn, five days after Judge Contreras accepting the initial pleading. No explanation as to ‘why’? (Reuters) The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia judge presiding over the criminal case for President Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has been recused from handling the case, a court spokeswoman said on Thursday. (read more) One might think the media apparatus, or pundit proletariat writ large, might be curious about why a U.S. District Court Judge...

Full Title:********************** Judge Who Presided Over Michael Flynn’s Case and Recused Himself — IS OBAMA APPOINTEE WHO ALSO SITS ON FISA COURT! ********************************************** On Thursday evening U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras recused himself from former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s criminal case. Emmet G. Sullivan will now oversee over the trial.

Wedged into a secure, windowless basement room deep below the Capitol Visitors Center, U.S. District Court Judge John Bates appeared before dozens of senators earlier this month for a highly unusual, top-secret briefing. The lawmakers pressed Bates, according to people familiar with the session, to discuss the inner workings of the United States’ clandestine terrorism surveillance tribunal, which Bates oversaw from 2006 until earlier this year. FISA court papers show NSA warrantless surveillance rules Classified documents spell out procedures for targeting foreigners and minimizing the collection of data from U.S. persons. Bates had rarely spoken of his sensitive work. He...

For instance, a ruling declassified this month by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) chronicles nearly 10 pages listing hundreds of violations of the FBI’s privacy-protecting minimization rules that occurred on Comey’s watch. The behavior the FBI admitted to a FISA judge just last month ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight the bureau promised was in place years ago.

The blogger behind incredible claims that the FBI had a warrant to examine the Trump campaign's communications is facing serious questions about her legitimacy after making a series of conspiracy-theory claims about elaborate Russian plots that appear to have little basis in reality. Louise Mensch is a British politician turned New York blogger who reported on the website Heat Street that the FBI was granted a FISA court warrant to access communications made by Trump's team during the presidential campaign.

The FBI obtained a secret court order last summer to monitor the communications of an adviser to presidential candidate Donald Trump, part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign, law enforcement and other U.S. officials said. The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page’s communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials. This is the clearest evidence so far that the FBI had reason to believe...

I assume this Washington Post story is true: “FBI obtained FISA warrant to monitor former Trump adviser Carter Page.” It confirms what has been sporadically reported since late last year, that the Obama administration sought and ultimately received a FISA order to spy on at least one associate of Donald Trump. So Trump’s famous tweets were, in substance, true.***SNIP***UPDATE: We are now starting to get a picture of how sinister this whole Democratic Party misinformation campaign is. Through the last half of 2016, the Obama administration was desperately searching for evidence of some link between the Trump presidential campaign and...

Two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community have confirmed to Heat Street that the FBI sought, and was granted, a FISA court warrant in October, giving counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia. Contrary to earlier reporting in the New York Times, which cited FBI sources as saying that the agency did not believe that the private server in Donald Trump’s Trump Tower which was connected to a Russian bank had any nefarious purpose, the FBI’s counter-intelligence arm, sources say, re-drew an earlier FISA court request around possible...

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement concerning the retention of metadata collected in accordance with section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. “On June 29, 2015, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court George Bush. The Patriot Act originated on his watch George Bush. The Patriot Act originated on his watch approved the Government’s application to resume the Section 215 bulk telephone metadata program pursuant to the USA FREEDOM Act’s 180-day transition provision. As part of our effort to transition to the new authority, we have evaluated whether NSA should maintain access to the historical metadata after the...

A judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has ordered the Obama administration to review for possible public release legal opinions issued by the secret court dealing with the constitutionality of the widespread collection of phone records by the National Security Agency. Friday’s ruling by one of the FISC judges, F. Dennis Saylor IV, a US district judge in Boston, is important, because it could mark a new willingness by the court to permit a level of public scrutiny of its decisions.

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material. In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then...