The FISA applications were never verified for accuracy

In National Review, Andrew McCarthy tells us,

A salacious Clinton-campaign product was the driving force behind the Trump–Russia investigation.

On a sleepy summer Saturday, after months of stonewalling, the FBI dumped 412 pages of documents related to the Carter Page FISA surveillance warrants — the applications, the certifications, and the warrants themselves. Now that we can see it all in black and white — mostly black, as they are heavily redacted — it is crystal clear that the Steele dossier, an unverified Clinton-campaign product, was the driving force behind the Trump–Russia investigation.

Were the allegations thoroughly vetted and confirmed by proof independent of Steele before being presented to the FISA court — which is what common sense and the FBI’s own manual mean by “verified”?

No, they were not.

...If Steele had been corroborated, rest assured that the bureau would not be suffering in silence.

...Steele has not been in Russia for about 20 years. In connection with the dossier allegations, he was merely the purveyor of information from the actual sources — unidentified Russians who themselves relied on hearsay information from other sources (sometimes double and triple hearsay, very attenuated from the supposed original source).

...The FBI (and, I’m even more sad to say, my Justice Department) brought the FISA court the Steele-dossier allegations, relying on Steele’s credibility without verifying his information.

Read more here.

"Phase Two"

Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes continues to press forward to unravel the FISA-gate scandal. Catherine Herridge, Pamela K. Browne, and Cyd Upson report for Fox News,

House Republicans are expanding their investigation of the Trump dossier, seeking answers from Obama administration officials including a former staffer for Vice President Joe Biden whose husband works for the firm behind the controversial document, Fox News has learned.

A source familiar with the matter confirmed to Fox News that Shailagh Murray, who was Biden's former deputy chief of staff and communications director before serving as a senior adviser to President Obama, will be sent a questionnaire Friday.


Murray, (l.), and Kahl, (r.) are among the latest to be questioned regarding the dossier

The questionnaire, from Republican Chairman Devin Nunes of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, will ask when Murray became aware that the dossier - commissioned by opposition research firm Fusion GPS - was funded by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign.



A questionnaire is also being sent to a second official who also worked in Biden's office. Colin Kahl was a former national security adviser to the vice president and before that, a deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.

Kahl told Fox News he had not received the questionnaire. Multiple attempts to contact Murray were unsuccessful. They have until March 19 to respond.

The intelligence committee is seeking information about the dossier, which contains what former FBI Director James Comey described as "salacious and unverified" claims about President Trump's activities in Russia prior to his election. The committee last month released a memo summarizing findings in its initial investigation into the dossier, which it determined became the basis for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant to spy on Trump associate Carter Page despite its dubious origin.

The questionnaires are apparently part of "Phase II" of the committee's probe. The panel, chaired by Nunes, has already fired off similar questionnaires to more than a dozen of current and former officials -- including Comey -- asking when they learned about the dossier's political roots, and what, if any, official actions they took. Most have responded, with a handful requesting additional time. Their deadline is March 9.

In addition to Comey, the questionnaire went out to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, who testified in May 2017 that the Trump dossier was virtually unknown to him.

“I have no awareness,” Brennan said, when asked by GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy if the FBI ever relied on the dossier as part of any court applications.

In a letter obtained by Fox News, Nunes posed a string of dossier-related questions to the current and former intelligence, law enforcement and State Department officials. He specifically wants to know when they learned the document was funded by Democratic sources, and how it was used to obtain one or more surveillance warrants at the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The new letter includes a dozen questions about the dossier, including how the officials in question learned of the document’s Democratic funding and whether they held meetings about the unverified allegations against Trump or took any other official action.

In the letter, Nunes even threatened to issue subpoenas if he doesn't get answers.

"If you do not provide timely answers on a voluntary basis, the Committee will initiate compulsory process,” he wrote.

Uncovering the conspiracy

"You're darn right we're going to put them on trial."

Devin Nunes is interviewed by Sharyl Attkisson. She asks him about abuse of the FISA court by officials of the FBI and DOJ. "If they are committing abuse before a secret court, getting warrants on American citizens, you're darn right we're going to put them on trial."

Watch the interview here.

The list of wrongdoings goes on and on. One of the gravest scandals in post-war American history!

At National Review, Victor Davis Hanson writes,

The FISA-gate, Clinton emails, and Uranium One scandals are sort of reaching a consensus. Many things quite wrong and illegal were done by both Hillary Clinton and her entourage and members of the Obama agencies and administration — both the acts themselves and the cover-ups and omissions that ensued.

Remember, in the FISA-gate scandal such likely widespread criminal behavior was predicated on two premises: 1) certainty of an easy Clinton victory, after which the miscreants would be not only excused but probably rewarded for their zeal; 2) progressive hubris in which our supposedly moral betters felt it their right, indeed their duty, to use unethical and even unlawful means for the “greater good” — to achieve their self-described moral ends of stopping the crude and reactionary Trump.

The wrongdoing probably includes attempting to warp a U.S. election, Russian collusion, repeatedly misleading and lying before the FISA courts, improperly surveilling American citizens, unmasking the names of citizens swept up in unlawful surveillance and then illegally leaking them to the press, disseminating and authenticating opposition smears during a political campaign, lying under oath to Congress, obstructing ongoing investigations, using federal funds to purchase ad hominem gossip against a presidential candidate, blatant conflicts of interests, weaponizing federal investigations, trafficking in and leaking classified information . . . The list goes on and on.

...In some sense, we are in uncharted territory — given the misadventure of appointing Robert Mueller as special counsel. His team is now replaying the role of Patrick Fitzgerald in the Scooter Libby case: investigating a crime that did not exist and that even if it did was committed by someone else.

The Mueller team’s likely parachute will have little if anything to do with the Russian collusion that it originally and chiefly was appointed to investigate. Instead, it’s likely to settle for perjury and obstruction charges against peripheral Trump officials (if the cases are not thrown out by possible reliance on tainted FISA transcripts).

The indictments may gain a little traction if they are timed to be released before the midterm elections, hyped in the mainstream media, and calibrated to be tried before liberal D.C. juries. The investigation may seek some redemption or justification if it criminalizes the secretly taped bombast of a Trump family member, catching him in some sort of perjury trap or business misdeed.

Once a special counsel is appointed, can he be superseded by a really special or special-special counsel, an attorney who might have to investigate the other special counsel (who was in charge of the botched Clinton Uranium One scandal, who was appointed through a clear and constructed conflict of interest, and whose own team is largely composed of proud partisans and campaign donors, and who may have been involved in using poisoned FISA surveillance data to leverage confessions or indictments)?

Director Comey was fired. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was forcibly retired. FBI lawyer Lisa Page was reassigned and demoted. FBI general counsel James Baker resigned. Senior agent Peter Strzok was reassigned and demoted. The former FBI director’s chief of staff, James Rybicki, resigned. Mike Kortan, FBI assistant director for public affairs, took retirement. Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr was reassigned and demoted. Justice Department’s counterintelligence head, David Laufman, resigned. A cadre of others “unexpectedly” have left, allegedly (or conveniently) for private-sector jobs. Such career implosions do not happen without cause.

Voters would only grow more cynical if some Americans were allowed to abuse constitutionally protected civil liberties, and to lie to the Congress, the FBI, and the courts, while the less connected others go to jail for much less. Without a judicial accounting, it will be impossible to clean up the hierarchies of the FBI and the DOJ.

Attorney General Sessions must find muscular, ambitious, and combative prosecutors (preferably from outside Washington, D.C., and preferably existing federal attorneys), direct them to call a Grand Jury, and begin collating information from congressional investigations to get to the bottom of what is likely one of gravest scandals in post-war American history: the effort to use the federal government to thwart the candidacy of an unpopular presidential candidate and then to smear and ruin his early tenure as president.

Only another prosecutorial investigation, one way or another, will lead to resolution, take the entire mess out of the partisan arena, and keep the anemic Mueller investigation honest — with the full knowledge that if its own investigators have violated laws or used tainted evidence or in the past obstructed justice, then they too will be held to account.

Read more here.

"Asking questions of those in power used to be something we could all agree on"

hat tip The Conservative Treehouse

Why FISA-gate may become a more worrisome scandal than Watergate or Iran-Contra

At American Greatness, the eminent historian Victor Davis Hanson writes that he believes FISA-gate is scarier than Watergate.

The Watergate scandal of 1972-74 was uncovered largely because of outraged Democratic politicians and a bulldog media. They both claimed that they had saved American democracy from the Nixon Administration’s attempt to warp the CIA and FBI to cover up an otherwise minor, though illegal, political break-in.

In the Iran-Contra affair of 1985-87, the media and liberal activists uncovered wrongdoing by some rogue members of the Reagan government. They warned of government overreach and of using the “Deep State” to subvert the law for political purposes.

We are now in the midst of a third great modern scandal. Members of the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice sought court approval for the surveillance of Carter Page, allegedly for colluding with Russian interests, and extended the surveillance three times.

But none of these government officials told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the warrant requests were based on an unverified dossier that had originated as a hit piece funded in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear Donald Trump during the current 2016 campaign.

Nor did these officials reveal that the author of the dossier, Christopher Steele, had already been dropped as a reliable source by the FBI for leaking to the press.

Nor did officials add that a Department of Justice official, Bruce Ohr, had met privately with Steele—or that Ohr’s wife, Nellie, had been hired to work on the dossier.

Unfortunately, such disclosures may be only the beginning of the FISA-gate scandal.

...How does FISA-gate compare to Watergate and Iran-Contra?

Once again, an administration is being accused of politicizing government agencies to further agendas, this time apparently to gain an advantage for Hillary Clinton in the run-up to an election.

...But there is one huge (and ironic) difference. In the current FISA-gate scandal, most of the media and liberal civil libertarians are now opposing the disclosure of public documents. They are siding with those in the government who disingenuously sought surveillance to facilitate the efforts of a political campaign.

...Progressives are not supposed to destroy requested emails, “acid wash” hard drives, spread unverified and paid-for opposition research among government agencies, or use the DOJ and FBI to obtain warrants to snoop on the communications of American citizens.

...FISA-gate may become a more worrisome scandal than either Watergate or Iran-Contra. Why? Because our defense against government wrongdoing—the press—is defending such actions, not uncovering them. Liberal and progressive voices are excusing, not airing, the excesses of the DOJ and FBI.

Apparently, weaponizing government agencies to stop a detested Donald Trump by any means necessary is not really considered a crime.

Read more here.