A rule of the FISA court bars the deliberate presentation of flawed evidence for a surveillance warrant…
Andrew McCabe/IMAGE: YouTube
(Mark Tapscott, Lifezette) Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe may have increased the legal jeopardy he’s facing and that four other top federal law enforcement officials are facing as well — by telling Congress in December 2017 that no surveillance warrants could be sought without using the undocumented Steele dossier.
The reason is simple: By the procedural rules governing surveillance warrant requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, federal officials are barred from knowingly using undocumented evidence.
But thanks to the court’s “Woods Procedures,” that’s exactly what was done by McCabe. That’s also what was done by his former boss, then-FBI Director James Comey, former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, former acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente, and current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
They did so by signing FISA surveillance warrant requests based on the Steele dossier, the opposition research compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele of allegations about President Donald Trump’s links to Russian government and business figures who supposedly helped him win the White House in 2016.
The Democratic National Committee and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign committee indirectly paid for the Steele dossier via a Washington, D.C. law firm. Comey told Congress in 2016 the dossier was “salacious and unverified.”
The FISA court was told of neither the dossier’s undocumented basis nor who paid for its production, a potentially serious violation of the Woods Procedures. Former CBS News investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson explains:
Woods Procedures were named for Michael Woods, the FBI official who drafted the rules as head of the Office of General Counsel’s National Security Law Unit. They were instituted in April 2001 to ‘ensure accuracy with regard to … the facts supporting probable cause’ after recurring instances, presumably inadvertent, in which the FBI had presented inaccurate information to the FISA court.
Prior to Woods Procedures, ‘[i]ncorrect information was repeated in subsequent and related FISA packages,’ the FBI told Congress in August 2003. ‘By signing and swearing to the declaration, the headquarters agent is attesting to knowledge of what is contained in the declaration.’”
Attkisson also points out that the FBI imposed, beginning in 2003, a rigid and complicated internal review process to subject FISA surveillance applications to an extremely rigorous assessment to ensure evidence presented to the court was solidly documented and credible.
The Robert Mueller who was director of the FBI in 2003 is the same Robert Mueller who is now the special counsel, whose investigation is relying in part upon the “salacious” and “unverified” Steele dossier used to gain approval to spy on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page in the Russia collusion investigation.
A Texas Republican congressman is calling for an action that would clarify for everybody involved exactly what the FISA court was told in the applications for surveillance of Page.
Rep. Louie Gohmert, who is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, told LifeZetteMonday that “it is absolutely imperative that we in the judiciary committee get the transcripts of what was presented, what was said and argued before the secret FISA court.”
With the transcripts in hand, Gohmert said, “we can determine, among other things, if there was a fraud perpetrated upon the court, whether the court failed to properly elicit sufficient information to justify the secret surveillance of an American citizen, and why the FISA court appears to have taken no action against any attorney if such attorney misled the Court.”
Gohmert noted that “as a former felony judge, I know that a judge who has even the smallest amount respect for his or her position should be righteously outraged when a lawyer misleads or omits critically important information while seeking a warrant, especially a warrant to secretly surveil an American citizen.”
The Texas congressman added that “since it appears our Democrat colleagues have no objections to an administration using politically motivated and contrived information to weaponize the federal government against its political opponents, it is even more critical that the Judiciary Committee get the FISA court transcripts to review what went on within the FISA court, even if we have to do it in a classified setting.”
Republished with permission from Lifezette via iCopyright license
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Did Steele Really Snooker the FBI?
The bureau should have known he was talking to the press—but it told the FISA court he wasn’t.
Christopher Steele in London, March 7, 2017. PHOTO: VICTORIA JONES/ZUMA PRESS
By
Kimberley A. Strassel WSJ
Feb. 4, 2018 3:55 p.m. ET
The House Intelligence Committee memo about 2016 surveillance abuses, released Friday, lays out grave evidence that the FBI wasn’t fully forthcoming with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as it sought an order to wiretap former Trump adviser Carter Page. It’s possible the FBI’s lack of candor was even worse than the memo describes.
Democrats are disputing the memo on lots of grounds, but they’ve said little about the FBI’s failure to inform the court that the bureau had itself decided one of its main sources, dossier author Christopher Steele, was unreliable. Mr. Steele in October 2016 gave Mother Jones an unauthorized interview about the dossier. As a former British intelligence officer, Mr. Steele would have known that sources are not supposed to blab to the press. The interview appeared but a few days before the election, was at the direction of his paymaster, the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, and was clearly designed to help the ultimate client: the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Stuck with a source now brazenly using the FBI for political purposes, the bureau suspended and then terminated Mr. Steele. Only nine days before the Mother Jones interview, the bureau had filed its application for the Page wiretap order, which rested on the Steele dossier. Yet the FBI did not immediately go back to tell the court it no longer trusted Mr. Steele, the author of a crucial piece of evidence.
And the Mother Jones interview wasn’t the first time Mr. Steele went to the press. A month earlier he had sat down with an array of media outlets to brief them on the dossier that he’d given the FBI in July. Out of this came a Sept. 23, 2016, article by Michael Isikoff in Yahoo News, published under the headline “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” The story was a bombshell, blowing the FBI investigation into the public sphere.
The FBI and Justice Department intimately knew this article, as they relied on it as part of their wiretap application. And while Mr. Isikoff did not name Mr. Steele as his source, the FBI should have been able to figure out his identity. The Isikoff article relates specific dossier details, though the dossier wasn’t public at the time. It explains that the “intelligence reports” the FBI was reviewing—the dossier—came from a “well-placed Western intelligence source.” Sen. Chuck Grassley last month referred Mr. Steele to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation of whether he lied to the feds about his contacts with the press. From this we can assume that the FBI’s FISA court application claimed Mr. Steele had not worked with the press.
The House memo gives the FBI the benefit of the doubt, stating that Mr. Steele “improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI about those contacts.” Then again, what was the date of this claim? If Mr. Steele told the FBI when he first met with them in July that he’d not briefed media, that would have been accurate as far as we know. Did the FBI ask him again after the Isikoff article?
Even if it did and if he denied talking to reporters, the FBI would have had every reason to believe he was lying. The provenance of the Isikoff article is exceptionally clear. And the FBI could easily have checked Mr. Steele’s recent whereabouts (Britain or the U.S.) or even asked Mr. Isikoff, though he might not have answered. While Mr. Steele might have proved unreliable, there’s reason to wonder if he’d lie outright to the FBI.
The Grassley referral needs be fully declassified, just as the House memo was. The FBI needs to answer straightforward questions about Mr. Steele’s claims, and he needs to provide his version.
The FBI got fooled by a source, or it knew its source was lying, or it didn’t bother to check, or it was too incompetent to see the obvious. Take your pick. None of the possibilities look good, especially if you’re a FISA judge.
Ms. Strassel writes the Journal’s Potomac Watch column.
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