One of Robert Mueller’s top prosecutors when Mueller was special counsel is underwhelmed by the advice former Obama administration lawyer David Kris gave on reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process.
Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department official who was known as Mueller’s “pitbull” during the Russia investigation, delivered a mixed review Thursday of what Kris has done since being appointed the FISA court’s pick to oversee the FBI’s enactment of reforms following a scathing DOJ inspector general report last year. He critiqued a brief Kris submitted last week that pushed for improved communications between FBI and DOJ attorneys on FISA matters beyond what the bureau has proposed.
After prefacing his assessment by noting, “I think that David is a really great lawyer and has a perfect background for submitting this,” Weissmann said, “I was a little disappointed. I didn’t think it went far enough.”
Adding that there needs to be a “wider conversation” about FISA reform, Weissmann said on a “positive note” he did agree with Kris’s initial evaluation that the Justice Department and FBI’s series of reforms did not go far enough.
Kris was selected as the FISA court’s amicus curiae after DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a report in December that lambasted the department and the FBI for 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to its targeting of onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, stretching from October 2016 to the summer of 2017. The report also reviewed the broader counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, who said he “deeply regrets” the FBI’s failures in the Page FISA process, offered a timetable of reforms and training the bureau is undertaking. But, in a court filing on Wednesday, Kris wrote that the FBI’s refinements would be insufficient without restoring a “strong organizational culture of accuracy and completeness” and called for the bureau to come up with “dramatically expanded” proposals.
Republicans have raised concerns about Kris, citing how he talked up Mueller’s Russia investigation, criticized the House Intelligence Committee’s 2018 memo on alleged FISA abuses, and heralded Horowitz’s report for how it “repudiates the claims of a coup and related deep-state conspiracies in the FBI as advanced by President Trump and his supporters.”
On the Democratic side, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler requested the Justice Department and FBI share FISA-related documents with the panel as it considers potential reforms.
Weissmann, who, like Kris, had positions in the DOJ during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations and was FBI general counsel from 2011 to 2013 when Mueller was director, additionally wrote an article for Just Security about the need for the “increased” amicus role in the FISA process.
McCabe, one of the high-ranking officials who signed off on a Page FISA warrant application, acknowledged on Thursday that there is a “critical weakness” in the FISA process and called for there to be a “permanent” institution to coordinate DOJ and FBI lawyers to ensure FISA applications have all the evidence they need.
