December 19, 2019 • 15
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The former FBI director knew
exactly what his agency had on Carter Page and, contrary his assertion, it’s
incredibly easy to get a FISA warrant.
Former FBI Director James
Comey gave an interview this
week to journalist Chris Wallace on Fox News in which he made one of the most
disingenuous and dissembling statements I’ve heard in years, one that screams
out for correction and real Congressional oversight.
When asked about Justice
Department Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz’s report, which found “17
significant errors and omissions” by the FBI when it began investigating alleged
Russian involvement with the 2016 Trump campaign and it applied for a Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against former Trump campaign aide
Carter Page, Comey said that he had been “overconfident” when he defended the
FBI’s use of FISA.
Overconfident! Comey
ignored the fact that the FBI repeatedly
renewed the warrant against Page, whom the FBI suspected was working
for Russian intelligence, even if it had no evidence to indicate that was the
case. He downplayed the fact that an FBI attorney illegally changed an
FBI report to indicate that Page was not working for the CIA, when
the FBI knew for a fact that he was.
Perhaps most disingenuously, Comey
told Wallace that, “I thought the FBI had gone about this in a
thoughtful and appropriate way. He’s (Horowitz) right. I was
wrong. I was overconfident as director in our procedures…It’s incredibly
hard to get a FISA.”
Comey downplayed the fact that
this all happened on his watch. The buck was supposed to stop with
him. He was the boss, the commander, the one giving the orders. He
knew exactly what the FBI had on Page and what it did not. And the truth
was that it had nothing.
Comey’s Lie About a FISA
Warrant
Even more importantly, at
least for the American people as a whole, is Comey’s lie that “it’s incredibly
hard to get a FISA.” It’s actually incredibly easy to get a
FISA. Over its 33-year
lifespan, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has issued
33,942 warrants. It has denied 12. In fact, between the court’s
creation in 1986 and 2003, it didn’t deny a single request for a warrant.
Those numbers simply don’t support Comey’s odd contention that it’s “incredibly
hard” to get a FISA. He’s lying to us.
(Flickr/Mike Licht)
And the truth of the matter is
that the FISA court isn’t really a court at all. It meets in
secret. A “defendant” has no idea that the government is asking for a
warrant against him. The defendant has no attorney to represent his
interests before the court.
All that happens — literally —
is that the FBI, usually with CIA or NSA information, goes before a FISA judge
and says, “We think person X is dangerous or working for the Russians or is a
terrorist or finances terrorists or is a spy and we want a secret warrant to
tap his phones, intercept his emails, collect his metadata, and put physical
surveillance teams on him.” Out of 33, 960 requests, the court has
approved 33,942 of them. “Incredibly hard” indeed.
There is talk of reform,
however. In a rare public order this week, the FISA court condemned
the FBI for the errors and omissions that led to the warrant being
issued (and reissued) against Page, and the court gave the FBI until Jan. 10 to
come up with a list of reforms to prevent such an event from happening
again.
The senior judge wrote:
“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. 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.”
That’s a start. But real
reform has to be more than just a list by Jan. 10. The American people
must see real reform. We need to see that more than 0.03
percent of warrant requests are denied. We need to see fewer overall
requests. And most importantly, we need to see that the congressional
oversight committees are doing their jobs. The statistics on warrants
requested and warrants granted are unacceptable.
It’s Congress’s job to protect
our civil rights and civil liberties. We need to see proof it’s
happening.
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