CODEVILLA: I Helped Write FISA. Let’s Destroy It

If you wondered what the role of Stefan Halper, Joseph Mifsud, and Alexander /Downer was in the Russia Hoax, here's the answer.  

 

 Circa March 2016, as it appeared that Donald Trump would be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in the forthcoming election, someone with White House authority — we do not yet know who or through what channel — directed the National Security Agency electronically to surveil communications in and out of Trump’s campaign headquarters in New York’s Trump Tower. At the same time, the CIA and FBI were vectoring longstanding CIA assets, including Stefan Halper in Britain and Joseph Mifsud in Italy as well as Australia’s Alexander Downer not so much to gather information about low-level Trump advisers’ contacts with the Russians, but to provide pretexts for further surveillance of Trump and, above all, for press stories implicating Trump with Russia. By July 2016, the FBI and CIA had encompassed the Trump campaign in formal counterintelligence and criminal investigations, while shopping suggestive allegations to the press. The so-called Steele dossier, alleging a host of details, some lurid, all false, was part of this classic political agitprop. 

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FISA Court Says FBI Lied to Them, Illegally Spied

With Mueller out of business, Trump is going after the crooks who tried to overturn the 2016 election ... big time!

According to diGenova, and here is the tremendous breaking news: The FISA court has been looking into abuses of the FISA system and has communicated with the Justice Department about its findings. Their chief judge has already determined that for more than four years before the election of Donald Trump, there was an illegal spying operation (yes, spying — and, yes, illegal) going on by four FBI contractors to break the law to steal personal electronic information about American citizens and to use it against the Republican Party.

It might be good to go back and read that last sentence again, slowly, and let it sink in.
Bombshell Reports

The people heading up the Justice Department at that time — including Attorney General (AG) Sally Yates and Assistant AG John Carlin — apparently knew about it and lied to the FISA court. It seems that by the time they withheld the political origins of Christopher Steele’s Trump “dossier” to the court, it was already business as usual to deceive those judges, who no doubt have steam coming out of their ears....

FBI: if we tell lies to a FISA Judge and he approves it, it's the truth.

Shen followed with another broad, all-encompassing question about the propriety of the FBI and DoJ’s behavior: “Are you aware,” she asked Priestap, “of any instances where the FBI or DOJ did not present what constituted credible and sufficient evidence to justify a FISA warrant?”

Priestap’s response is a textbook case of circular logic: “If it's not justified, the court doesn't approve it. So, like, if we're not meeting the standard required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the requests are turned down.”

“So, in other words,” said the Democratic counsel, “by definition, if you presented information and a FISA court approved it, that would constitute credible sufficient information?”

“In my opinion,” said Priestap, “yes.”

Sit back and savor that exchange for a moment. One of the most senior officials in the Federal Bureau of Investigation – an organization that regularly refers for prosecution people who don’t tell the full truth – champions this peculiar standard of credibility: If you can snooker a FISA court judge, the information used to traduce the court is rendered by definition “credible sufficient information.” What is the condition of the FBI if its leaders think whatever you can get past a judge is good enough?

Daniel Greenfield: ALL THE PRESIDENT’S HACKS: MEDIA FAKE NEWS FUELED OBAMA’S WATERGATE

When Hillary Clinton cites the “intelligence community assessment” to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the presidential election, she’s really repeating her own lie, that her campaign created, rolled through the media and the government, which used it to spy on the Trump campaign, and then finally became an “assessment” under orders from Obama carried out by political allies like Clapper and Brennan.

The media, which once boasted of exposing Watergate, had played a key role in Obama’s Watergate.

The release of a redacted FISA warrant application exposes the fact that the spying on Carter Page, a figure associated with the Trump campaign, relied on no sources other than Democrats and media allies.

In 2016, an arm of the Clinton campaign began assembling a dossier claiming that the Trump campaign was seeking damaging information about it from the Russians. The dossier actually represented an effort by the Clinton campaign to seek damaging information from the Russians about the Trump campaign.

The man tasked with that job, a former British intelligence agent named Christopher Steele, then went on to accuse figures involved with the Trump campaign, of doing the very thing he had been hired to do.

One of those men was Carter Page.

The Steele dossier claimed that Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was using Carter Page as an intermediary to work with the Russians against Hillary Clinton. But it was Steele who had actually been hired by the Clinton campaign to get information from the Russians to use against Donald Trump.

The FISA application to eavesdrop on Page is based on Steele’s work and the media echo chamber created around it. The intelligence assessment, which former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper admitted had been carried out under Obama’s orders, has the same tainted origins.

A Democrat smear was used by a Democrat administration to undermine a Republican’s victory.

The FISA application bets everything on Steele, while trying to hedge its bets by citing news stories, because Steele’s allegations against Page are as much of a dog’s breakfast as the rest of the dossier.

The entire excuse for spying on Carter Page and the Trump campaign were reports in the media based on a Clinton/DNC opposition research report that was never verified to this day.

The application mentions that "there has been speculation in the U.S. media that the Russian Government" was behind the DNC hack. Media allegations and speculations fill the application. First Amendment protections made the media very useful cutouts for the Clinton campaign.

The unredacted FISA application was based entirely on the work of Democrats and their media allies.

Fusion GPS, the organization used to hire Steele, used its contacts in the media and the government to seed the dossier. Then the dossier and the news stories based on it were used in the FISA application. Its claims about Steele’s Russian trip in 2016 are based on the unverified Steele dossier. ...
Instead of providing a second intelligence source, they offered a news story anonymously citing an intelligence source providing information to intelligence officials. But they were the intelligence officials....

The media has made Watergate into an essential part of its brand. Generations of reporters have come of age at journalism schools pretending to be Woodward and Bernstein. Not only did the media fail to expose Obama’s Watergate, but it was a key part of the infrastructure for spying on Republicans.

The FISA application reveals that domestic surveillance of Republicans would not have been possible without the media. In 2016, the media had become an official part of ‘All the President’s Men’. The reporters had become the plumbers of a political police state. Their smears were used to eavesdrop on political opponents and cast doubt on the outcome of a free and open election.

The media claims that it safeguards democracy. The FISA application shows it’s a threat to democracy.

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The FISA application: Nunes was right (and it’s not Andrew C. McCarthy’s FBI anymore)

This is a particularly important admission because confirmation bias would ordinarily cause him to think the opposite. It’s one of the reasons I so admire McCarthy; he can admit he’s wrong. He also isn’t usually wrong. But he has been consistently wrong in thinking that the same agencies (and even in some cases the same people) he used to know in another time and another setting (a non-Trump-Derangement setting) are being on the up-and-up and have some integrity in connection with their actions towards Trump and anything to do with Trump.

McCarthy can hardly believe the truth he’s learned; it’s so disillusioning. But he does believe it when he sees the evidence right before his eyes.

McCarthy has had a little more time now to write a column, and he further expands on some of the ideas he touched on in that interview. Please read his column in its entirety. Here’s an excerpt:

When people started theorizing that the FBI had presented the Steele dossier to the FISA court as evidence, I told them they were crazy: The FBI, which I can’t help thinking of as my FBI after 20 years of working closely with the bureau as a federal prosecutor, would never take an unverified screed and present it to a court as evidence. I explained that if the bureau believed the information in a document like the dossier, it would pick out the seven or eight most critical facts and scrub them as only the FBI can — interview the relevant witnesses, grab the documents, scrutinize the records, connect the dots. Whatever application eventually got filed in the FISA court would not even allude en passant to Christopher Steele or his dossier. The FBI would go to the FISA court only with independent evidence corroborated through standard FBI rigor.

…[and] in the unlikely event the FBI ever went off the reservation, the Justice Department would not permit the submission to the FISA court of uncorroborated allegations; and even if that fail-safe broke down, a court would not approve such a warrant.

It turns out, however, that the crazies were right and I was wrong. The FBI (and, I’m even more sad to say, my Justice Department) brought the FISA court the Steele dossier allegations, relying on Steele’s credibility without verifying his information.

I am embarrassed by this not just because I assured people it could not have happened, and not just because it is so beneath the bureau…I am embarrassed because what happened here flouts rudimentary investigative standards. Any trained FBI agent would know that even the best FBI agent in the country could not get a warrant based on his own stellar reputation…

…Much of my bewilderment, in fact, stems from the certainty that if I had been so daft as to try to get a warrant based on the good reputation of one of my FBI case agents, with no corroboration of his or her sources, just about any federal judge in the Southern District of New York would have knocked my block off — and rightly so.

That’s why I said it.

And what I have to say to Andrew McCarthy is this: it’s not your FBI or your DOJ anymore. You’ve been away for a while, and the entire ethos seems to have changed, and those changes are dangerous. The frenzy to get Trump has caused the people involved to cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil:

This is the reason that some people who broke the rules and the laws to deny Trump the Presidency that he won must go toprison.

Contreras Recusal Conflict – FBI Agent Peter Strzok Friends With Flynn Judge Rudolph Contreras…

For those following the increasingly curious case against General Mike Flynn, events take another unusual turn today. Congressional investigators have shared a set of unredacted text messages between FBI Agent Peter Strzok and his cohort DOJ Attorney Lisa Page which reveal a personal friendship between Agent Strzok and Flynn’s initial presiding judge Rudolph Contreras.

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Scandal, Corruption, Lawbreaking — And So What?

Victor Davis Hanson

The FISA-gate, Clinton emails, and Uranium One scandals are sort of reaching a consensus. Many things quite wrong and illegal were done by both Hillary Clinton and her entourage and members of the Obama agencies and administration — both the acts themselves and the cover-ups and omissions that ensued.

Remember, in the FISA-gate scandal such likely widespread criminal behavior was predicated on two premises: 1) certainty of an easy Clinton victory, after which the miscreants would be not only excused but probably rewarded for their zeal; 2) progressive hubris in which our supposedly moral betters felt it their right, indeed their duty, to use unethical and even unlawful means for the “greater good” — to achieve their self-described moral ends of stopping the crude and reactionary Trump.

The wrongdoing probably includes attempting to warp a U.S. election, Russian collusion, repeatedly misleading and lying before the FISA courts, improperly surveilling American citizens, unmasking the names of citizens swept up in unlawful surveillance and then illegally leaking them to the press, disseminating and authenticating opposition smears during a political campaign, lying under oath to Congress, obstructing ongoing investigations, using federal funds to purchase ad hominem gossip against a presidential candidate, blatant conflicts of interests, weaponizing federal investigations, trafficking in and leaking classified information . . . The list goes on and on.

The State Department is now involved. Apparently anyone who was a former Clinton smear artist can pass fantasies to a sympathetic or known political appointee at State. And if the “dossier” fits the proper narrative and shared agenda, it gains credence enough to ensure that it is passed up to senior State officials and on to the FBI. Perhaps a private citizen with a grudge against a rival should try that as well. These scandals will grow even greater before various congressional investigations expire....

I think the Democratic fallback position will be to point to the career carnage at the FBI and DOJ as punishment enough.

Director Comey was fired. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was forcibly retired. FBI lawyer Lisa Page was reassigned and demoted. FBI general counsel James Baker resigned. Senior agent Peter Strzok was reassigned and demoted. The former FBI director’s chief of staff, James Rybicki, resigned. Mike Kortan, FBI assistant director for public affairs, took retirement. Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr was reassigned and demoted. Justice Department’s counterintelligence head, David Laufman, resigned. A cadre of others “unexpectedly” have left, allegedly (or conveniently) for private-sector jobs. Such career implosions do not happen without cause.

Voters would only grow more cynical if some Americans were allowed to abuse constitutionally protected civil liberties, and to lie to the Congress, the FBI, and the courts, while the less connected others go to jail for much less. Without a judicial accounting, it will be impossible to clean up the hierarchies of the FBI and the DOJ.

Indeed, absent accountability and punishment, the new modus operandi would be for any lame- duck incumbent administration to use federal agencies to enhance the campaign of its own party’s nominee. It would be only logical to conclude that criminal acts used to help a successor would be forgotten or rewarded under the victor’s tenure.

...
We can't allow this to end with a standoff, where the people who committed crimes and tried to remove a freely elected President get away with it. It's not good for the country.

Attorney General Sessions must find muscular, ambitious, and combative prosecutors (preferably from outside Washington, D.C., and preferably existing federal attorneys), direct them to call a Grand Jury, and begin collating information from congressional investigations to get to the bottom of what is likely one of gravest scandals in post-war American history: the effort to use the federal government to thwart the candidacy of an unpopular presidential candidate and then to smear and ruin his early tenure as president.

Only another prosecutorial investigation, one way or another, will lead to resolution, take the entire mess out of the partisan arena, and keep the anemic Mueller investigation honest — with the full knowledge that if its own investigators have violated laws or used tainted evidence or in the past obstructed justice, then they too will be held to account.

Washington's spies

Before FISA, there really were no limits on what could be intercepted by intelligence agencies. This was abused over and over again, usually by the FBI, which used national security as a reason to intercept phone conversations of pretty much anyone who was thought to present some kind of a threat.

Even at the time FISA passed, though, civil libertarians were warning that there was little real protection against the Government using the information they collect maliciously. The problem goes back to the basics: you need to make sure that the people with access to the collected data were thoroughly checked and could be trusted.

In the United States, though, there’s a significant loophole, called “an election.”

Necessarily, when we elect a president, the president has complete access to any data — the president is the authority who decides what data is to be protected, and with what rigor. The president’s political appointees, just as necessarily, must have the same access. Our only real protection from illicit disclosure by these insiders is the degree to which they can be trusted. An unscrupulous political appointee on the president’s national security staff can obtain anything and leak anything.

In the Obama administration, scruples about information security were notably lacking. We saw it with the Clinton emails, where information security procedures were openly flouted, and where, frankly, multiple felonious violations of the espionage went unpunished.

And we’re seeing it now: Susan Rice, and probably a number of others, violated the provisions of FISA, and certainly, with no reasonable doubt violated the privacy of at least one U.S. Person.

FISA is coming up for renewal not too long from now, and FISA’s opponents have got a new and very strong argument that the government cannot be trusted with the power to intercept U.S. Persons communications.

If FISA were eliminated, the U.S. would lose a valuable tool — we really do need to be able to intercept communications within the U.S., for both state and non-state (read “terrorist”) actors. But for Americans to be able to trust their government with these surveillance powers, we have got to be able to trust that unscrupulous political appointees are deterred, and that illicit actions will be punished.

Yes, political abuse is always the threat, and when it’s not punished it becomes a much greater threat. And Charlie’s right that if there’s no accountability here, it’s going to be much harder to muster support for keeping FISA.

Glenn Reynolds on charlie Martin on Team Obama's spying on political opponents.