The Senate is set to revive a fight over a shadowy surveillance court, bringing to a head a months-long stalemate that resulted in the lapse of three intelligence programs.
The looming debate, which will pit some of President Trump’s biggest allies against one another, comes on the heels of growing questions about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court after the Justice Department inspector general found widespread errors as part of an interim report on warrant applications.
WASHINGTON – The “central and essential” evidence used to justify invasive surveillance of an American citizen in the FBI’s probe into Russian interference was, itself, an example of Russian interference, according to once-secret footnotes declassified at the urging of two U.S. Senators. The footnotes, part of the Justice Department Inspector General’s postmortem of the FBI’s flawed operation to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, were released just hours after Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) renewed their push for transparency. The senators expect a fuller declassification in the coming days.
(…)
“It’s ironic that the Russian collusion narrative was fatally flawed because of Russian disinformation. These footnotes confirm that there was a direct Russian disinformation campaign in 2016, and there were ties between Russian intelligence and a presidential campaign – the Clinton campaign, not Trump’s.”
The IG report detailed how the FBI’s application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Page relied heavily on an unverified dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of Fusion GPS, which was conducting opposition research for the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. According to Footnote 302, in October 2016, FBI investigators learned that one of Steele’s main sources was linked to the Russian Intelligence Service (RIS), and was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer. However, the FBI neglected to include this information in its application, which the FISA court approved that same month. Two months later, investigators learned that Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, told a Justice Department attorney that he assessed the same source “was a RIS officer who was central in connecting Trump to Russia.” In January, the FISA warrant was renewed.
(10.04.2020)
Declassified footnotes to a Justice Department inspector general report show that the Federal Bureau of Investigation team investigating members of the Trump campaign received classified reports in 2017 identifying key pieces of the Steele dossier as products of a Russian disinformation campaign. This might be only the tip of the iceberg because other recently declassified information demonstrates that even more disinformation may have been planted in Christopher Steele’s reporting.
(July 2, 2019)
Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska said he previously employed Christopher Steele, the author of the Trump dossier.
Deripaska said he hired Steele through his attorneys in London to work on an unspecific legal proceeding.
Steele investigated the Trump campaign on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC.
(10.04.2020)
Footnote 350 in the IG report addresses the FBI‘s knowledge of Russian contacts with Steele and the potential for disinformation. Steele had „frequent contacts with representatives for multiple Russian oligarchs, we identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received from (redacted) indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele‘s election reporting.“
The footnote also indicates that warnings to the FBI‘s Russia probe became more pronounced over time.
(31.03.2020)
The FBI’s surveillance of Americans including former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page isn’t exactly the issue du jour amid a global pandemic. But on Tuesday, a brutal inspector general’s report suggested that this will be something that the bureau and Congress will have to reckon with in the near future.
(15.12.2019)
California Congressman Devin Nunes, Republican ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee demands Schiff to call on IG Horowitz to testify before House Intelligence Committee.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has dealt with some of the most sensitive matters of national security: terror threats and espionage. Its work, for the most part, cannot be examined by the American public, by order of Congress and the president. Its work has been mostly secret, its structure largely one-sided.
„The most unusual thing is that there is a body of law that the court has created, but as a practitioner that is part of that law, we have between zero and some very limited knowledge of what that law is,“ Michael Sussmann, a former Justice Department prosecutor and current private attorney in the consumer and computer-privacy field, told Fox News. „But, it‘s the fact that there is a secret law and a secret body of law that makes it the most vexing.“
(today)
….They want to Impeach me (I’m not worried!), and yet they were all breaking the law in so many ways. How can they do that and yet impeach a very successful (Economy Plus) President of the United States, who has done nothing wrong? These people are Crazy!
10,120 replies 12,033 retweets 44,359 likes
(11.01.2017)
So etwas ist noch nie passiert. Die gesamte Situation ist präzedenzlos.
Das angeblich belastende Material, wie beschrieben angeblich von irgendeinem britischen Agenten, etc, ist bereits gestern auf Buzzfeed veröffentlicht worden. Es ist dermaßen ekelhaft, dass es einem die Schuhe auszieht. Und es wird mir schlecht, wenn ich sehe wie die Leute auf Twitter darauf reagieren. Offensichtlich wurde diese Fälschung, die als solche u.a. von Gateway Pundit und Wikileaks identifiziert wurde, nur mit einem Ziel entworfen: Trump anzuschießen und zwar so, dass er nie wieder aufsteht.
Trumps Reaktion ist, nun ja, fast etwas verwirrt. Im Laufe des heutigen Tages hielt er seine Pressekonferenz als gewählter Präsident ab. Allen Anwesenden war, nach meinem Eindruck, eine Art Schock über die Situation ins Gesicht geschrieben. Selbst der bemühte, ab und an aufbrandende Beifall änderte nichts an der gespenstischen Situation.
Während der Pressekonferenz übernahm Trump einerseits zum ersten Mal die Position der C.I.A. und äußerte hastig zwischen zwei Sätzen zur Frage, wer verantwortlich sei für den angeblichen Hack gegen die Parteizentrale der „Demokraten“ („Democratic National Committee“, D.N.C.),
„Ich glaube, es war Russland“ („I believe, it was Russia“)
Gegen Mittag hatte Trump andererseits zu dem veröffentlichten „belastenden Material“ getwittert:
„(Die) Geheimdienste hätten niemals erlauben sollen, dass diese Fake News an die Öffentlichkeit ´geleaked´ werden. Ein letzter Schuss gegen mich. Leben wir in Nazi-Deutschland?“
(today)
The inspector general concluded that central to the FBI’s court applications for surveillance of Page were a set of allegations provided by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The Steele dossier, as it came to be known, contained allegations against Trump, Page and other Trump associates, and those allegations have been the subject of intense political fighting since they became public in early 2017.
(20.11.2019)
The FBI is seeking an interview with a CIA whistleblower whose complaint led to an impeachment inquiry into whether President Trump abused his office in his dealings with the Ukrainian president, according to three people familiar with the matter.
“The Inspector General report showed the FBI was willing to do anything in order to spy on Carter Page, including making 17 significant inaccuracies and omissions. The American public deserves to know everything the FBI did,” Kennedy said in a statement Friday.
“I’m asking President Trump to declassify the entire record so that Attorney General Barr and FBI Director Wray can release it to the American people. If the FBI wants to continue the employment of rogue, politically-motivated agents, then let the public read the entire record.”
At more than 400 pages, the study amounted to the most searching look ever at the government’s secretive system for carrying out national-security surveillance on American soil. And what the report showed was not pretty.
The Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, and his team uncovered a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process in how the F.B.I. went about obtaining and renewing court permission under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.
„As we noted publicly last year in our report, we were very concerned about that,“ Horowitz said at Wednesday‘s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
„We are investigating those contacts. We‘ve issued a couple of public summaries so far about people we‘ve found violated FBI policy. We have other investigations ongoing,“ Horowitz continued.
He added that, while it has been hard to prove the substance of conversations between FBI and reporters or outside individuals, “we can prove the contacts.“
„Under FBI policy you need authorization if you‘re going to disclose information and have certain contacts,“ he said.
Following Monday‘s release of the long-awaited FISA report on FBI abuses while investigating the Trump campaign, during the 2016 US election, Inspector General Michael Horowitz is testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
Horowitz‘s report found „significant inaccuracies and omissions,“ yet despite the fact that the FBI‘s elite made numerous errors and harbored extreme animus against Donald Trump, none of that affected their investigation.
Horowitz also found that the FBI had an “authorized purpose” to launch the investigation, a conclusion that Attorney General William Barr disagreed with on Monday in a public statement.
Horowitz’s report also criticized the FBI’s handling of applications for warrants to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The report, however, sharply criticizes the FBI over its handling of applications to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, providing fodder for Trump and his Republican allies while at the same time undercutting a key GOP talking point that agents driven by bias improperly targeted then-candidate Trump.
The findings released by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz set the stage for a partisan showdown on Capitol Hill, where he is slated to testify publicly Wednesday to answer questions from a Senate panel about the inquiry into the FBI’s Russia probe.