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Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz released scathing findings Tuesday on his agency’s review of numerous FBI applications for warrants in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court saying ‘we do not have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods Procedures.’ The months long review was initiated last year after it was discovered that the bureau agents involved in the now debunked investigation into President Donald Trump’s campaign and whether it colluded with Russia, had altered documentation and withheld vital information from the court on then campaign advisor Carter Page. The warrant obtained by the FBI was used to spy...

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified Wednesday that the actions taken by the bureau to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page were “unacceptable” and “cannot be repeated.” During his first congressional appearance following the release of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s FISA review last year, Wray vowed to reform the FISA system by implementing “specific procedures and safeguards.” “The failures highlighted in the inspector general report are unacceptable, period. And they cannot be repeated,” Wray testified before the House Judiciary Committee. “I have already ordered more than 40 corrective actions to our...

The FISA court's top judge wrote in a secret ruling on January 7 that at least two of the four spy warrants against Carter Page were invalid and not lawfully authorized. Authority granted to the federal government to secretly wiretap and spy on former Trump affiliate Carter Page was “not valid,” the nation’s top spy court noted in a secret ruling penned earlier this month. The order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which was created and authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), was initially signed and issued on January 7, 2020, but was not declassified and...

The FISA court officially acknowledged Thursday that the FBI submitted false information when obtaining warrants to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Therefore, the FISA warrants that were issued are invalid. "Thanks in large part to the work of the Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, the Court has received notice of material misstatements and omissions in the applications filed by the government in the above-captioned dockets. See Docket No. Misc. 19-02, Order (Dec. 17, 2019; DOJ PIG, Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation (Dec. 2019)," the court released...

The Justice Department has concluded that the evidence underlying multiple warrants authorizing the surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page failed to show Page was a foreign agent, as the law requires. The department delivered its conclusion in a December letter to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the secretive federal body that approved the department’s four surveillance applications of the Trump aide. A Justice Department assessment found that in at least two applications "there was insufficient predication to establish probable cause to believe that Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power," states a FISC court...

A FISA Court order declassified Thursday confirmed that the government had found two of the four FISA applications authorized for the FBI to surveil 2016 Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page to be “not valid,” and will further investigate the validity of the other two. The order revealed that the government found two of the surveillance application renewals to be “not valid” because the FBI provided “insufficient predication to establish probable cause to believe that Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power.” Based on the ordering of the applications, it is likely the review found the second and third...

<p>Say you’re a secret federal court that signed off on wiretaps of a Trump campaign official based on Russian disinformation financed by the Clinton campaign and midwifed through anti-Trump partisans at the FBI. The court did nothing about this deception for three years despite accumulating evidence presented to it. Once this is all publicly exposed, would your response be to hire a former Obama official and media apologist for the FBI to restore the court’s credibility?</p>

For example, an unidentified FBI supervisory special agent (SSA) mentioned in the IG report was responsible for ensuring that the bureau’s “Woods Procedures” were followed in the Page warrant application. According to the procedures, factual assertions need to be independently verified, and information contradicting those assertions must be presented to the court. But Horowitz found several instances in which the procedures were not followed. Horowitz’s report leaves little doubt that the unnamed SSA is Joe Pientka — a current bureau employee. Pientka briefly appeared on the FBI’s website as an “Assistant Special Agent in Charge” of the San Francisco field...

FBI Director Christopher Wray told the federal surveillance court in a letter Friday that he “deeply regrets” the bureau’s many errors in the process to obtain surveillance warrants on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. “The FBI has the utmost respect for this Court, and deeply regrets the errors and omissions identified by the OIG,” Wray wrote in a letter to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). A judge on the FISC ordered the FBI on Dec. 17 to respond by Friday with a roadmap on how the bureau plans to address the problems identified in a Justice Department inspector...

As impeachment remains stalled for now, Democrats in the House of Representatives still refuse to release the closed-door testimony of a key witness in the concocted drama: Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community. Atkinson, you may recall, launched the impeachment saga when he determined that the accusations by the “whistleblower” about Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president last summer were so alarming as to deem the complaint a matter of “urgent concern.” (It wasn’t.) Atkinson sent two letters to the House Intelligence Committee demanding immediate attention to the bogus complaint. “I have not been authorized to...

The report of the I.G.'s findings on the use of FISA in the FBI Crossfire Hurricane investigation is an outrage. As a 22 year FBI Agent, I have personally conducted multiple investigations using both Title III "wiretaps" and FISA authorized intercepts. From this perspective, I can only see two possible interpretations of the actions of the FBI and DOJ. Either scenario should anger and frighten every fair minded citizen who takes the time to read the report and understand its implications. . . snip If the heinous abuses documented in the I.G.s report result in a weakening or loss of...

Rosemary Collyer is the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (the “FISC”). FISC is the judicial body that issues surveillance warrants to our intelligence agencies, principally the FBI, authorizing the interception of electronic communications of people located in the United States who are agents of foreign governments or who have connections to foreign terrorist organizations. On December 17, Judge Collyer issued a FISC opinion that was highly unusual because it was unclassified and made public. The Horowitz report said that the FBI intentionally misled the court by using incomplete and bogus information as the basis for it to...

FISA Court Neck Deep In Surveillance On Trump Campaign, Knew Of Application Issues, Report Carmine Sabia By Carmine Sabia Published December 26, 2019 at 9:49am The Deep State is a real thing, and with each new report or finding we discover that it is deeper than any of us have imagined. In the most recent case, it appears that the FISA courts were aware that the applications to spy on Carter Page, an aide with President Donald Trump’s campaign. After the report of Inspector General Michael Horowitz, the head of the FISA courts, Judge Rosemary Collyer, ripped into the FBI...

Presiding judge Rosemary Collyer, having returned from her vacation on Mars and just in time for her retirement, has demanded of the FBI revised procedures to ensure that the multiple frauds committed upon the court, including inclusion of fraudulent material, omission of exculpatory information, and the deliberate alteration of documents to mislead the court. It was farcical to hear her, in the face of multiple felonies in a Deep State plot bordering on sedition, suggest that revised procedures for the handling and submitting of FISA applications is the answer to our chief law enforcement agency's attempt to overthrow a sitting...

Indications are that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump campaign may not have been what has been revealed to date. Two facts buried in the recently released DOJ IG Report have explosive implications and strongly suggest that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was a joint CIA/FBI Operation. The IG Report reveals that Russian Oligarch 1 was the “subject of a Crossfire Hurricane case.” See page 194 of the FISA report: However, the IG Report states that the FBI only opened Crossfire Hurricane cases against four individuals, Page, Papadopoulos, Manafort and Flynn. This was noted in the first page of the...

Eric Holder and Wapo threaten U.S. Attorney John Durham for looking into spygate We’ve all heard the joke. A thuggish looking guy walks into a business he is trying to shakedown and says, “Nice little store you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.” Wink, wink. The message is crystal clear; do what the bully wants or else something really bad is going to happen. This scene has now played out in real life. In a so-called “news” article in the Washington Post recently, “Experts fear Durham’s Reputation at Risk in FBI Probe,” the newsletter for...

In 2018, the U.S. government filed 1,117 final applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for authority for the FBI to conduct electronic surveillance and physical searches. One application was withdrawn. One other was denied. The remaining 1,115 were granted.Hours before the FISA court issued a December 17 order openly declaring that it could no longer trust any of the sworn statements the FBI had submitted to justify spying on Americans, The New York Times published an opinion article by William Webster, a former director of both the FBI and the CIA. Webster wrote, “Today, the integrity of...

The FISA court has awakened from its deep slumber. Too damned late… and not enough. Finally, the FISA court has awakened from its deep slumber. Too damned late… and not enough. On Tuesday, presiding judge Rosemary Collyer issued an order slamming fired director James Comey’s FBI for presenting “false information,” concealing exculpatory evidence, and misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But her judicial fix is feckless. She is now demanding that the FBI present the steps it will take to remedy these problems in future surveillance warrant applications. If this is her idea of a solution, it’s a joke. And...

GOOD DISCUSSION OF FBI FISA ABUSE

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court this week blasted the Federal Bureau of Investigation for “misconduct” in the Carter Page surveillance warrant. Some would call this accountability. Others will more rightly call it the FISC’s “shocked to find gambling” moment. ... On Feb. 7, 2018, Devin Nunes, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to Judge Collyer informing her of its findings in his probe of the FBI’s Page application. He wrote that “the Committee found that the FBI and DOJ failed to disclose the specific political actors paying for uncorroborated information” that went to the court, “misled...