The secret federal court that approves orders for conducting surveillance on suspected foreign terrorists or spies issued a strong and highly unusual public rebuke to the FBI on Tuesday, ordering the agency to say how it intends to correct the errors revealed last week by a Justice Department report on one aspect of the FBI's investigation of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said the FBI made serious and repeated mistakes in seeking under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to conduct surveillance of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.
The FBI's submission to the court made assertions that were "inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation," the report said.
Rosemary Collyer, presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, said in the unusual public order that the report "calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable." She ordered the FBI to explain in writing by Jan. 10 how it intends to remedy those problems.
Document here: https://www.scribd.com/document/440156909/Fisa-Court-to-FBI
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 18 2019, @06:52PM
And that VERY good reason was? They never did pin anything on Carter Page, the pretext for starting this surveillance, and much of the existing indictments would happen anyway (Manafort, for example) since the investigations started elsewhere and were merely taken over by Mueller.
Now, that power to start surveillance of political rivals with very flimsy pretext rests in the hands of Trump. Better think about what that means.