DOJ review finds ‘material errors or omissions’ in 2019 FISA applications

The Justice Department said it is still compiling the final results of those field office accuracy reviews, but so far determined one FISA application contained “two material errors,” while another FISA application had “some material omissions.” The government said it reported the errors and omissions to the FISA court and “assessed that, notwithstanding these errors or omissions, probable cause existed to find that the targets were acting as an agent of a foreign power.”

Assistant Attorney General John Demers stated that “although accuracy reviews, which involve travel and in person meetings, are currently suspended due to Coronavirus, we will restart them as soon as we can with a 50 percent increase in oversight positions and increased rigor.”

The FBI said its court filing was “an update regarding some of the corrective actions that the FBI has made and continues to make to its FISA processes,” and added these steps were part of the 40-plus corrective actions that FBI Director Christopher Wray ordered in December.

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s lengthy report released late last year criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page in 2016 and 2017, and for the bureau’s reliance on British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s unverified dossier. Steele put his research together at the behest of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm. Horowitz also criticized the bureau for not sharing exculpatory information from confidential human sources with the FISA court.

The FISA court and its hand-picked amicus curiae, David Kris, issued recommendations to the Justice Department and FBI about the FISA process, and asked the government to respond with how it was fixing the flaws.

“In light of the findings of the OIG Report, the Government has taken multiple steps … to improve the FISA process to facilitate the accuracy and completeness of FISA applications,” the DOJ and FBI told the court. They said the DOJ’s Office of Intelligence “has taken steps to ensure the continued proactive approach of its attorneys during the iterative FISA application drafting process.”

As of late March, the Justice Department and FBI said they instituted a new confidential human source checklist to remind agents of the information the court needs to “evaluate the credibility of the CHS and the reliability of the information provided by the CHS” and to identify for Office of Intelligence attorneys “any issues flagged by those agents in the checklist that may require follow-up.”

Horowitz released a memo earlier in April showing FISA flaws were not just limited to the surveillance of Page. Horowitz’s audit focused on the FBI’s requirement to maintain an accuracy subfile known as a “Woods File.” Investigators found serious problems in each of the 29 FISA applications they examined — including four FISA applications where the Woods File was either missing or never existed.

The FISA court responded to the memo by ordering the Justice Department to provide the court with “the names of the targets” for all 29 applications. In a rare public order last year, the FISA court criticized the FBI’s handling of the Page applications as “antithetical” to the FBI’s “heightened duty of candor” and demanded answers from the bureau.

“The FBI remains confident that these corrective actions will address the errors identified in earlier FISA applications that the IG reviewed in connection with its recent Woods Procedures audit as well as its review of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” the FBI said in a Friday statement.

The Justice Department and FBI’s court filing was unsealed the same day that declassified footnotes from Horowitz’s FISA report were released, showing that the Crossfire Hurricane team were briefed on a document which assessed that an individual dubbed “Person 1” — described as a “key Steele sub-source” — had been described to them as someone with “historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to RIS” — or Russian Intelligence Services. The document described reporting that Person 1 “was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer.”

The newly public information also shows FBI investigators received information from a still-redacted source in 2017 “indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting” seemingly related to the biggest salacious and unverified claims in Steele’s dossier about Trump in a Moscow hotel in 2013 and about former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen meeting with Russians in Prague in 2016.

Earlier this week, transcript of an FBI confidential human source’s conversations with George Papadopoulos were unearthed, showing the former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser repeatedly denying the Trump campaign’s involvement in anything related to the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee — denials concealed from the FISA court.

Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October 2017 to making false statements to the FBI about his discussions with mysterious Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud, whom he said informed him about possible Russian “dirt” on Clinton.

Last year, Attorney General William Barr picked U.S. Attorney John Durham to carry out an investigation of the Trump-Russia investigators. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who altered a document in the Page FISA filings, is the only person publicly known to be under criminal investigation by Durham.

The Justice Department told the FISA court it believed the final two of four Page FISA warrants were “not valid,” and the FBI has moved to “sequester” all of the information gleaned from the Page surveillance.

Wray agreed there had been at least some illegal surveillance and said he was working to “claw back” that FISA information.