(Ken Silva, Headline USA) It’s been roughly six years since the FBI submitted error-ridden FISA warrant applications to spy on the Trump campaign, and more damning information about them continues to be revealed.
RealClear Investigations published a story Tuesday, showing that the FBI relied on a Washington Post story that had already been debunked in one of its FISA warrant applications. Moreover, the Justice Department has sought to keep this fact secret by redacting the Post from its publicly available warrant on the grounds that it was one of the bureau’s confidential “sources and methods.”
“The FBI tried to justify continuing to spy on Page in early 2017 by indicating to the secret FISA court that it had verified a rumor about Page receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government and facilitating a ‘well-developed conspiracy of cooperation’ with the Kremlin to swing the 2016 election in Trump’s favor,” wrote RCI’s Paul Sperry.
“But the bureau had corroborated no such thing. Its source was a front-page report in the Washington Post—one the newspaper later retracted after determining it was false.”
Reacting to this latest revalation about the FISA warrant scandal, the Project for Privacy & Surveillance Accountablity said it shows how ridiculous the U.S. government’s classification system is.
“So that’s the FBI’s ‘source and method’ deemed so sensitive that it had to be hidden from the public? It was a subscription to The Washington Post,” PPSA remarked.
“Who knows what other embarrassments government hides with its redactions.”
PPSA further suggested that the FBI’s actions violated former President Barack Obama’s Executive Order 13526, which said that information cannot be classified by the government to merely spare an agency embarrassment.
As has been well publicized by now, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found in December 2019 that the FBI’s FISA warrants to spy on former Trump campaign aid Carter Page contained at least 17 material errors.
Most notoriously, disgraced FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith doctored one of the applications to make it seem as though Page was colluding with the Russians, when in fact he was a trusted CIA asset who had been informing the agency about Russian activities.
Clinesmith pleaded guilty in August 2020 to doctoring an email used to underpin a FISA warrant application. He avoided jail time, and has been reinstated to the District of Columbia Bar.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
