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FBI says FISA request forms will now ask whether target was government source
 [Washington Examiner] One of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reforms undertaken by the FBI is implementing more stringent requirements for asking whether a possible target has been a source for the U.S. government.Carter Page displays his best John Brennan scowl. The change was revealed following a related guilty plea in U.S. Attorney John Durham’s inquiry into the Russia investigation. Dawn Browning, the acting general counsel for the FBI since July, submitted a declaration to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that was made public Monday. The filing said that updated FISA request forms, specifically related to requests for business records and the use of pen register and trap and trace devices, "include a number of improvements," including "questions about whether the target or subject of the request was previously interviewed by, or served as a confidential human source, asset, or operational contact of, the FBI, any other government agency, or a foreign government." Durham collected his first guilty plea on Wednesday from former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who admitted to a false statements charge for altering a CIA email in 2017 that helped justify the continued FISA wiretapping of onetime Trump campaign aide Carter Page by fraudulently adding that Page was "not a source" for the agency, when the CIA had actually told Clinesmith and the bureau on multiple occasions that Page was an "operational contact" for them. Browning argued in the court filings that "the FBI remains committed to ensuring that FISA applications it submits to this Court are accurate and complete." The FBI’s top lawyer said the bureau’s new request and verification forms, once implemented, will "require case agents and their supervisors to affirm the accuracy and completeness" of their FISA application. Clinesmith, 38, who worked on the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server as well as on the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane inquiry and special counsel Robert Mueller’s team during the Trump-Russia inquiry, admitted that he falsified a document during a court hearing last week after Durham had submitted a five-page criminal information filing to the federal court noting Clinesmith was being charged. In a scathing July 2018 inspector general report on the FBI's Clinton emails investigation, Clinesmith was mentioned, but not by name, numerous times as one of the FBI officials who conveyed a possible bias against President Trump, including lamenting that “my god damned name is all over the legal documents investigating [Trump’s] staff” and proclaiming “Viva le resistance" after Trump's win. DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz made it clear in a December report that this specific FISA flaw went beyond just Clinesmith, noting that the FBI’s “failure to provide accurate and complete information” to the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence on Page's prior relationship with the CIA was “particularly concerning because” the DOJ attorney handling the case “had specifically asked the case agent in late September 2016 whether Carter Page had a current or prior relationship with the other agency” and had been told Page’s relationship was “dated.” But Horowitz said this was “contrary to information that the other agency had provided to the FBI in August 2016, which stated that Page was approved as an ‘operational contact’ of the other agency from 2008 to 2013.” Horowitz said that “Page's status with the other agency overlapped in time with some of the interactions between Page and known Russian intelligence officers that were relied upon in the FISA applications to establish probable cause” and noted that “Page had provided information to the other agency about his past contacts with a Russian Intelligence Officer, which were among the historical connections to Russian intelligence officers that the FBI relied upon in the first FISA application (and subsequent renewal applications).” Horowitz said the other agency “assessed that Page ‘candidly described his contact with’ Intelligence Officer 1 to the other agency” but that “the FBI relied upon Page's contacts with Intelligence Officer 1, among others, in support of its probable cause statement in the FISA application." Emphasis added. Posted by: Besoeker 2020-08-25 |
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