.Adam Schiff may be the biggest loser of Russia probe declassification

Schiff Report Claim: “FBI and DOJ officials did not abuse the FISA process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign. … DOJ met the rigor, transparency, and evidentiary basis needed to meet FISA’s probable cause requirement.”

Declassified Facts: Horowitz told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Dec. 11, 2019, “I do not think the Department of Justice fairly treated these FISAs.” His report went even further in describing how the FBI violated its own rules in submitting four FISA applications with a total of 51 pieces of unverified, inaccurate or false information. “FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are ‘scrupulously accurate,’” he wrote. “We identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation.” The FISAs were so flawed in fact that DOJ has formally withdrawn two of the applications from the court in their entirety because they were incontrovertibly inaccurate.

Schiff Report Claim: DOJ and FBI officials “made only narrow use of information from Steele’s sources about Page’s specific activities in 2016.”

Declassified Facts: Horowitz directly contradicted this claim, concluding the dossier “played a central and essential role” in the FISA application. “The FISA request form drew almost entirely from Steele’s reporting in describing the factual basis to establish probable cause to believe that Page was an agent of a foreign power,” the IG wrote.

Schiff Report Claim: “DOJ provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.”

Declassified Facts: “We found that the FBI did not have information corroborating the specific allegations against Carter Page in Steele’s reporting when it relied upon his reports in the first FISA application or subsequent renewal applications,” Horowitz reported in December....

But there is already ample evidence to show that the Steele dossier that the House Intelligence Committee chairman so readily embraced and read into the congressional record was, in fact, erroneous, uncorroborated and tainted by Russian intelligence efforts to inject misinformation.

Many of Schiff’s other claims have, likewise, crumbled under the weight of facts now in the public record.

And there is growing evidence that Schiff’s conservative critics intend to make him pay a political price for his past words, as Rep. Jim Jordan and other House GOP colleagues made clear in a letter this week urging the House Intelligence Committee chairman to release the interview transcripts.

“For almost four years, prominent Democrat politicians and commentators alleged that President Trump colluded with Russia, with Chairman Schiff going so far as to say that he had ‘direct evidence’ of collusion,” the lawmakers wrote.

“Now that these allegations have been disproven by several investigations, the American people deserve to have transparency about why public figures such as Chairman Schiff continued to promote such wild accusations.”