The Justice Department’s watchdog will audit Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications related to counterintelligence and counterterrorism to see if the FBI’s problems are systemic.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz explained the new investigation into how the bureau handles the FISA process in its other cases during a Wednesday hearing in front of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee focused on last week’s FISA report. Horowitz revealed 17 “significant errors and omissions” and the concealment of exculpatory information from the FISA court while relying upon allegations contained within British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s unverified dossier to go after former Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
“The concern is that this is such a high-profile, important case. If it happened here, is this indicative of a wider problem — and we will only know that when we complete our audit — or is it isolated to this event?” Horowitz said. “Obviously, we need to do the work to understand that.”
Horowitz explained that one problem with the Page FISA process was the bureau’s failure to follow Woods Procedures — which require agents to verify and reverify factual assertions and the characterizations of claims made by confidential human sources throughout the FISA process — and to accurately document it in the Woods File. Horowitz said he didn’t know how widespread these failures were since the Page FISA is the most scrutinized ever. The FISA court grants roughly 1,000 FISA warrants each year.
“What we’re going to do in the first instance — since we don’t know what we don’t know and the is, to our knowledge, the first-ever deep dive anyone has taken in a FISA — what we’re gonna do in the first instance is have our auditors do some selections of counterintelligence and counterterrorism FISAs,” Horowitz said. “This was a counterintelligence FISA, and we’ve heard a lot of concerns about counterterrorism FISAs, about targeting and other issues there. We’re going to take a sampling. We’re going to look and compare and see how the Woods Procedures played out in those FISAs by comparing the Woods binders to the FISAs and see if the same basic errors are occurring there.”
Broader concerns about the FISA process have long existed, especially among civil liberties activists.
“The litany of problems with the Carter Page surveillance applications demonstrates how the secrecy shrouding the government’s one-sided FISA approval process breeds abuse,” Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, said. “The concerns the Inspector General identifies apply to intrusive investigations of others, including especially Muslims, and far better safeguards against abuse are necessary.”
