Judge blasts FBI over misleading info
for surveillance of Trump campaign
adviser
By
John Kruzel
December 18, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
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The secretive federal court that
approved the surveillance of former
Trump campaign adviser Carter Page on
Tuesday accused FBI agents of creating a
misleading impression about their basis
for requesting a warrant and ordered the
bureau to overhaul its process.
In
a blistering order, a judge on the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
(FISC) accused the bureau of providing
false information and withholding
materials that would have undercut its
four surveillance applications.
"The FBI's handling of the Carter Page
applications, as portrayed in the OIG
report, was antithetical to the
heightened duty of candor described
above," Rosemary Collyer, presiding
judge with the FISC, wrote
in the order released
by the court.
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The judge gave the FBI until Jan. 10 to
provide the court a sworn statement
detailing how it plans to overhaul its
approach to future surveillance
applications.
The order comes after the Justice
Department's Office of Inspector General
(OIG) released a report earlier this
month on its investigation into the
Trump campaign and the 2016 election,
with Inspector General Michael
Horowitz detailing a
series of missteps
taken during the investigation.
The FBI said it would take more than 40
"corrective steps"
in response to the watchdog report.
The surveillance court judge said
Tuesday that the inspector
general report documented “troubling
instances in which FBI personnel
provided information to NSD [the
National Security Division of the
Justice Department] which was
unsupported or contradicted by
information in their possession."
The judge also noted the report cited
“several instances” in which the FBI
sought to persuade the court that
probable cause existed to believe Page
was a Russian agent, but nonetheless
withheld “information in their
possession which was detrimental to
their case."
"The frequency with which
representations made by FBI personnel
turned out to be unsupported or
contradicted by information in their
possession, and with which they withheld
information detrimental to their case,
calls into question whether information
contained in other FBI applications is
reliable," Collyer wrote. "The FISC
expects the government to provide
complete and accurate information in
every filing with the Court. Without it,
the FISC cannot properly ensure that the
government conducts electronic
surveillance for foreign intelligence
purposes only when there is
a sufficient factual basis."
This article was originally published by "The
Hill"
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