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The FISA Court Finally Speaks
The FISA Court has issued an order in response to being deceived by the FBI, and they have rebuked the FBI for misleading them. That’s nice. I guess that makes it a tad more difficult for Schiff, Comey, et al., to lie about what the FBI did.
THEREFORE, the Court ORDERS that the government shall, no later than January 10, 2020, inform the Court in a sworn written submission of what it has done, and plans to do, to ensure that the statement of facts in each FBI application accurately and completely reflects information possessed by the FBI that is material to any issue presented by the application.
I’m sorry. This sounds a little too much like a “sternly worded letter,” if you know what I mean. No teeth. They disclose what the FBI did, but then tell the FBI to propose their own solution. Haven’t we had enough of flagrantly dishonest agencies policing themselves?
One caveat. The court demands that by today, 20 December 2019, the FBI complete a declassification review of a previous order from the court demanding answers to certain questions the court had regarding actions of an attorney in the Office of General Counsel. That’s the guy who altered the email to misrepresent the status of Carter Page as a government informant. The Court states it expects to release that document with minimal redactions subject to that declassification review.
So, today perhaps, we can expect a little more color than was provided by the IG report on what was going on at the FBI.
Reserving judgment until the details are released but, so far, not impressed!
Published in General
I always wondered what the FISA court’s role was in ensuring accuracy. I can’t imagine they do much, or are expected to. The Feds investigate. The FISA judge probably gives the documents a quick look and nothing more.
This stuff all needs to be declassified. Personally, I think FISA should be repealed. Andy McCarthy has sounded close to that recently.
The silence of the Senators is deafening. It feels like Rand Paul and Josh Hawley are the only ones paying attention.
The FISA court sounds sort of rubber stampish. I don’t think they’ve ever denied the FBI a warrant.
The Court should call into court everyone who signed the dishonest warrants and hold them all in contempt and put them all in a hole for as long as legally possible. No questions asked.
The problem doesn’t seem to be a lack of procedures to ensure validity of the FISA applications, the problem is that the procedures are being violated in a most blatant way by those entrusted with carrying them out.
The fix is not new procedures, it is new people and severe punishment to those who have violated the trust they held.
Justice delayed is justice denied. Manafort is dying in jail while Comey is on a book tour. Shameful.
Other presidents who should have been impeached according the legal standard of the DNC=Gary:
George Washington
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
James Monroe
John Quincy Adams
Andrew Jackson
Martin Van Buren
William Henry Harrison
John Tyler
James K. Polk
Zachary Taylor
Millard Fillmore
Franklin Pierce
James Buchanan
Abraham Lincoln
Andrew Johnson
Ulysses S. Grant
Rutherford B. Hayes
James Garfield
Chester A. Arthur
Grover Cleveland
Benjamin Harrison
Grover Cleveland
William McKinley
Theodore Roosevelt
William Howard Taft
Woodrow Wilson
Warren G. Harding
Calvin Coolidge
Herbert Hoover
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Harry S. Truman
Dwight D. Eisenhower
John F. Kennedy
Lyndon B. Johnson
Richard M. Nixon
Gerald R. Ford
James Carter
Ronald Reagan
George H. W. Bush
William J. Clinton
George W. Bush
Barack Obama
“But I’m sorry. This sounds a little too much like a “sternly worded letter” if you know what I mean.”
It’s the old you’re really in trouble this time mister routine you used to get from your father recited for the benefit of your mother.
I couldn’t possibly do better than to quote Kim Strassel’s tweets of a few hours ago, as they are so spot on:
@KimStrassel 1) It’s great that the FISA court slammed the FBI and acknowledged the obvious–that deceiving a surveillance court is a grave thing. But the follow on order is pathetic, as it is essentially: Please tell us how you intend to do better. Really?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? I have made this observation before but, especially considering this Milquetoast of an “Order”, it is, in the true sense of the word, incomprehensible to me that a Federal Court would allow two years to pass after the world knew they had been lied to without uttering a single word, and then to come down with this pathetic statement telling the Members of the Bar who LIED to them to go forth and do good, or, in this case, better. I feel so strongly about this due to years of dealing with Federal Judges, and many State Judges as well, who would have, about two years ago, issued a Show Cause Order to these FBI swine to show cause why they should not be held in open and contumacious contempt of Court, followed by a disbarment Order from that particular Court, followed by a referral to the State Bar Association for the most draconian possible disciplinary action possible under the applicable Rules of Professional Conduct. And those would just be the first steps for a number of Judges I dealt with. And this Court says, in effect, now y’all are just going to have to do better or I’m just going to have to do something, sometime, some day, some how. Maybe. Inexplicable.
Devin Nunes just said on Fox news that he sent two letters to the FISA court describing the omissions from the applications made by the FBI. Crickets, I guess.
Randy, Some have said ( unverified) that the denial rate is 1 in 10,000. To get a scope and magnitude of the problem in 2017 alone there were 3,100,000 702 searches on the NSA database by FBI “contractors”. That a means the government spied on American citizens over 3 million times in 2017 alone. In the Admiral Rogers audit of 2016 87% of those searches were found to be politically based.
“We will be very, very angry with you! And we will write you a letter telling you how angry we are.”
I remain unimpressed with the FISA court. Writing a letter was not enough.
Susan: “Devin Nunes just said on Fox news that he sent two letters to the FISA court describing the omissions from the applications made by the FBI. Crickets, I guess.”
According to Sundance at CTH, she did respond and downplayed the threat. She essentially told Congress and the Executive branch to work it out somehow.
But it is not like she wasn’t warned. The only positive is that she ordered her ruling to be totally declassified and released to the public.
I’m going to guess that she did that to cover her you-know-what. “I did my part . . . “
It might be nothing, but one time Grandma sent me out to cut my own switch.
In other words, there’s always the chance that if the court doesn’t like the response, they come up with their own solutions.
Could be the FISA Court know they are culpable for rubber stamping FISA applications and they don’t want to get into a tit for tat with the FBI/DOJ who may push back and expose the FISA judges ineptitude/malpractice?
Agreed. The FISA courts should refuse all FISA requests until the violators are removed from government and measures are put in place to prevent these abuses from happening in the future.
If they can do this to a president, what have they been doing all along to We the Little Peoople. Anyone with extraordinary powers must receive extraordinary punishment for the abuse of those powers.
Black holes are detected through other objects behaving oddly around them; what is it that is invisible to us that makes government people behave so unnaturally?
I am too, but who knows? Things just keep getting weirder, so maybe something will actually happen, like the FISA court boycotting all FBI requests until the issue is resolved.
But incredibly, the initial Carter Page warrant was denied. Only after they added the Steel ‘dossier’ was it awarded. Which shows how flimsy it was, it needed unverified lies to make it sound credible enough even for the rubber stamp!
Double-very good.
That’s a great analogy and a really good question. I’d like to think it was knowledge of details of which we are unaware. I think it is more likely to be corruption. For instance, I’m really disappointed in the lackluster response by Director Wray to the revelations of how poorly the FBI performed regarding this FISA scandal. I’d like to think that he is waiting for John Durham to complete his work and file indictments against the perpetrators. But I’m worried that the real reason for his less than forceful response is that he is trying to protect the reputation of his institution.
Or fear they’ll end up wearing stripes and being called “sweetheart” by their cell mates . . .
Sorta:
Yes. Accountability would restore a rightful level of positive reputation, based in facts and observable behavior.
Kabuki theater, unless and until they order the lawyers who appeared before them in the past to appear and show cause why they should not be referred for disbarment.
At this point they need to be closed and any cases that were made from info collected from it need to retried without that information or dismissed.
At the very least it would be interesting to see the statistics. I do think the Senate Intelligence committee needs to have a closed session with all current and previous judges and (1) take them to task and (2) ask how things need to be changed. The fact that none of the judges (that we know of) have expressed any outrage up to now does not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling.