‘Defendants and those they worked with inside the federal government did not and will not succeed in making America a surveillance state…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The fallout continues after the damning revelations in December regarding the actions that partisan FBI officials took to interfere with the election and undermine President Donald Trump.
In a letter to Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday, two GOP senators called for the declassification of four details in the FBI’s 2016 probe of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
And on Thursday, former Trump adviser Carter Page, the chief victim in the FBI’s domestic wiretapping scheme, filed a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee and others who spread misinformation about him in the now-discredited Steele Dossier.
“This is a first step to ensure that the full extent of the FISA abuse that has occurred during the last few years is exposed and remedied,” said Page’s attorney, John Pierce, according to Fox News.
“Defendants and those they worked with inside the federal government did not and will not succeed in making America a surveillance state,” Pierce said.
The Russia collusion conspiracy theory was ultimately debunked last year with the conclusion of the Mueller Report, the two-year special-counsel investigation that stemmed from the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. But the questions about the FBI’s collusion with the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign remain under criminal investigation by the Department of Justice.
A redacted report released in December by Michael Horowitz, the DOJ inspector general, found several critical abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that the FBI committed while seeking rubber-stamp approval from the secretive FISA court to spy on Page and other members of the Trump campaign.
Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, requested that four of the footnotes in Horowitz’s report be declassified in their letter to Barr on Tuesday.
They were not able to identify specifically which sections they were making reference to, but they publicly released a separate, unclassified version of the letter saying the publicly available information misleadingly contradicted the redacted version.
“[C]ertain sections of the public version of the report are misleading because they are contradicted by relevant and probative classified information redacted in four footnotes,” they wrote. “This classified information is significant not only because it contradicts key statements in a section of the report, but also because it provides insight essential for an accurate evaluation of the entire investigation.”
Separately, Page file his defamation suit on Thursday, which Pierce, his attorney, said was “only the first salvo” in his bid to hold accountable those who violated his privacy rights.
“We will follow the evidence wherever it leads, no matter how high,” Pierce said. “… The rule of law will prevail.”
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged last year—after it was revealed that the DOJ was moving into a criminal investigation—that top intelligence officials were simply following the marching orders of then-President Barack Obama.
A judge previously dismissed a suit filed in Oklahoma, Fox News reported. The present suit was filed in Illinois because, Pierce said, the relationship between Fusion GPS, the left-wing research firm that compiled the Steele Dossier, and Perkins Coie, the law firm that commissioned the dossier on behalf of the DNC and Clinton campaign, had begun in the firm’s Illinois office.
It alleged that Perkins Coie lawyers Marc Elias and Michael Sussman “used false information, misrepresentations and other misconduct to direct the power of the international intelligence apparatus and the media industry against [Page] to further their political agenda.”
Fox News noted that Pierce also is representing Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, a current Democratic primary contender who filed a defamation suit last week against Clinton for claiming she was a Russian agent.