The recently released transcript of Department of Justice lawyer Bruce Ohr’s congressional testimony confirms what conservatives have long been saying: The DOJ and FBI abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process to obtain a court order to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Page served as a volunteer foreign policy adviser for then-presidential candidate Trump from March 2016 until he stepped away from the Trump campaign in late-September 2016, following a Yahoo News report that U.S. intelligence officials were investigating alleged meetings between Page and senior Russian officials. Shortly after Isikoff’s article ran, the DOJ and FBI filed the first of four FISA applications, seeking court approval to surveil Page. The FISA court granted all four surveillance requests.
While the FISA applications remained sealed before the secret FISA court, in early February 2018, then-House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes, R-Calif., released a four-page memo detailing abuse by the DOJ and FBI in seeking to surveil Page. Then-House Intelligence Ranking Member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., soon countered with his own memo, which did nothing to dispel concerns. Later, the four FISA applications themselves were released which, though heavily redacted, added to the mosaic of abuse.
As the media so often say, conservatives pounced. “Look,” they seethed, “at the government’s abuse of power.” The list was long and the evidence strong. The DOJ and FBI sought a court order to surveil an American citizen based on the unverified, and largely unbelievable, ramblings of the Steele dossier. As evidence of a supposed crime, the FISA applications relied solely on double or triple hearsay from unverified sources.
The FISA applications also failed to inform the court that the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign had partially funded the Steele dossier. Also missing from the applications was any mention of dossier author and former MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s statements demonstrating his bias, such as that Steele was “desperate” to prevent Trump from becoming president.
As new facts continued to emerge over the last year, more signs of abuse appeared. For instance, while the FBI acknowledged interviewing former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos twice and Papadopoulos’ supposed Russian-connection, Joseph Mifsud, once, the FISA applications did not appear to be updated to inform the court of these interviews or the details gleaned from the FBI’s chats with the duo.
We also learned that Trisha Anderson, the deputy general counsel for the FBI, did not read the FISA application for Page before signing off on it. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein also apparently signed the final FISA renewal application without reading it and without being fully briefed on the details.
Notwithstanding this overwhelming evidence of FISA abuse, Democrats continued to reject suggestions that the DOJ and FBI acted inappropriately in conducting the Russia collusion investigation. But now we have solid evidence establishing that the FISA applications, sworn to by multiple Obama Administration officials and career DOJ and FBI agents, included at least one false statement: The FISA applications expressly stated that the FBI had “suspended its relationship with” Christopher Steele.
The recently released transcript of the testimony before the House Judiciary Committee of DOJ lawyer Bruce Ohr refutes this statement. Ohr testified that after Steele’s supposed suspension, the former British spy continued to pass intel on to the FBI using Ohr as the conduit. The FBI not only knew of this arrangement, but helped further this work-around by providing Ohr a dedicated agent to whom he could pass on Steele’s latest gossip, making the government’s representation to the FISA court that the FBI had suspended its relationship with Steele untrue.
So, the question is: Will Democrats finally admit to the FISA abuse that is plain for all to see?
Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She served nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk to a federal appellate judge, and is a former full-time faculty member and current adjunct professor for the college of business at the University of Notre Dame.
