[National Review] President Trump ought to direct his Justice Department and FBI to provide the House Intelligence Committee with the FISA warrant application ‐ any FISA warrant application ‐ in which they relied on information from the Steele dossier in seeking court permission to spy on the Trump campaign. It may well be that they did not rely on the dossier. It is ridiculous, though, that we are still in the dark about this.
I have long experience with how scrupulously the FBI and Justice Department work in the often controversial foreign-intelligence realm. They care deeply about their honorable reputation with the FISA court, just as the judges of that secret tribunal care deeply about not being perceived as a "rubber-stamp" for the government.
I have thus given our agencies the benefit of the doubt here. While urging that we have disclosure (with all due care to protect intelligence methods and sources), I have presumed that the FBI and DOJ would never fraudulently present the FISA court with fanciful claims attributed to anonymous Russian sources as if they were a refined product of U.S. intelligence collection and analysis. This, after all, is a "dossier" that former FBI director James Comey dismissed as "salacious and unverified" in Senate testimony just six months ago.
When a court is asked for a warrant, the government must provide the judge with a basis to believe the information proffered is credible ‐ by vouching that the source has been reliable in the past, by corroborating the information offered, or both. If Comey adjudged Steele’s information unverified in June 2017, it had to have been unverified ten months earlier. That’s when the FBI and Justice Department obtained a FISA warrant for Carter Page, who had been loosely described as a Trump campaign adviser.
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