by Chuck Ross
The top judge on the federal court overseeing surveillance activities accused the FBI on Tuesday of providing false and misleading information about Carter Page in applications to wiretap the former Trump campaign adviser.
Judge Rosemary Collyer, the presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), issued the stern and unprecedented rebuke in a memo ordering the FBI to come up with a series of proposals by Jan. 10, 2020, on how to ensure the accuracy of future applications for wiretaps.
“The FBI’s handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the [Office of Inspector General] report, was antithetical to the heightened duty of candor described above,” Collyer wrote in the order, first reported by The New York Times.
“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,” she added.
The Justice Department inspector general (IG) found that the FBI failed to inform officials with the Justice Department’s National Security Division, as well as the FISC, about exculpatory information that undercut the bureau’s theory that Page was an agent of Russia.
The FBI relied heavily on the infamous Steele dossier to assert that in the applications that there was probable cause to believe that Page was working for Russia. The FISC granted the first warrant against Page on Oct. 21, 2016.
The IG report that the FBI also withheld information that undercut the reliability of the dossier, and its author, Christopher Steele.
FBI agents failed to disclose that Steele said in one interview in early October 2016, before the bureau submitted the first wiretap application, that one of the main sources for the dossier was a “boaster” and “embellisher.” Agents also withheld statements from Steele’s main collector of information, who refuted key parts of the dossier during an interview in January 2017.
Collyer said the FISC was unaware of many of those omissions until the IG report was published.
“This order responds to reports that personnel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) provided false information to the National Security Division (NSD) of the Department of Justice, and withheld material information from NSD which was detrimental to the FBI’s case, in connection with four applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for authority to conduct electronic surveillance of a U. S. citizen named Carter W. Page,” Collyer wrote.
“When FBI personnel mislead NSD in the ways described above, they equally mislead the FISC.”
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Chuck Ross is a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse” by AgnosticPreachersKid. CC BY-SA 3.0.
