President Trump and his team have used the illegal surveillance of former Trump campaign associate Carter Page to argue that there is a “deep state” bias against his administration, but a newly revealed audit conducted by the Justice Department shows this might not be true.
In fact, the FBI routinely abuses the law in how it spies on most of its targets.
The New York Times reported Tuesday: “An inspector general uncovered pervasive problems in the F.B.I.’s preparation of wiretap applications, according to a memo released Tuesday about an audit that grew out of a damning report last year about errors and omissions in applications to target a former Trump campaign adviser during the Russia investigation.”
“The follow-up audit of unrelated cases by the Justice Department’s independent watchdog, Michael E. Horowitz, revealed a broader pattern of sloppiness by the F.B.I. in seeking permission to use powerful tools to eavesdrop on American soil in national security cases,” the newspaper continued.
The report noted that while the “finding of systemic incompetence is devastating for the F.B.I.,” there could also be a silver lining for the agency: “But in the Trump era, the discovery is leavened by an unusual side benefit for the bureau: It undercuts the narrative fostered by President Trump and his supporters that the botching of applications to surveil his campaign adviser Carter Page is evidence that the F.B.I. engaged in a politically biased conspiracy.”
See! There’s no bias against the president at all! The FBI abuses surveillance with reckless abandon, not just against Trump.
The Horowitz audit found that in a random sample of 29 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests to wiretap subjects allegedly involved with terrorism or espionage, there were problems with all 29.
Yes, that’s right: 100% of them.
The inspector general’s report stated: “We do not have confidence that the F.B.I. has executed its Woods Procedures in compliance with F.B.I. policy, or that the process is working as it was intended to help achieve the ‘scrupulously accurate’ standard for FISA applications.”
The investigation into the validity of the 29 FISA requests “identified apparent errors or inadequately supported facts in all of the 25 applications we reviewed.” The report revealed an average of about 20 problems with each request and a whopping 65 problems in one particularly egregious request that was reviewed.
Why didn’t they look into the other four cases out of the original 29? Because the FBI could not even locate the Woods file, the necessary protocol for pursuing these requests.
That’s pretty sloppy.
The 17 “significant errors and omissions” in Horowitz’s report from December regarding the Page case were apparently nothing compared to how the FBI conducts its business on a regular basis.
When Attorney General William Barr asked Republicans to pass a clean FISA extension in February, the law authorizing this broken surveillance system, he promised that any concerns about privacy rights and due process would be reformed internally. If anyone believed this then, how could they now?
When libertarian-leaning Republican Sens. Mike Lee and Rand Paul opposed Barr on a FISA extension, the attorney general said their objections were “dangerous.”
Now that the FBI’s malfeasance has been exposed and as the FISA debate continues, more members of Congress than ever before should sound the alarm on the inherent danger of a virtually limitless and permanent surveillance state.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
