The release of a heavily-redacted version of the FBI’s application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to wiretap onetime Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page has spurred calls to remove the redactions, to un-black out the pages blacked out by the FBI before the document was made public.
The long sections of censored material have made it impossible to reach definitive conclusions about the warrant application. It has also led to the publication of de-contextualized sensational accusations. For example, page 8 of the original warrant application contains a passage which begins with two blacked-out lines, then includes the words “the FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Candidate #1’s [Donald Trump’s] campaign,” and continues with more blacked-out material. Is there a critical prefatory clause in that sentence fragment? The answer is unclear.
Defenders of the FBI have begun to argue that the blacked-out portions contain the truly powerful evidence that supports their position.
“There is clearly information the government provided separate and apart from ‘Source #1’ (Steele) and open source info — and that fact that all those paragraphs are redacted suggests supporting info from OTHER sensitive methods and sources,” tweeted CNN commentator Asha Rangappa, a lawyer and former FBI agent.
It’s a point that is impossible to assess as long as the application remains heavily redacted. Which is why House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes — the man most responsible for bringing the application to light in the first place — is asking President Trump to declassify the rest of the warrant application.
[Related: FISA warrant application supports Nunes memo]
“We want the president to take care of the rest of these redactions, so there is full transparency and sunlight for everyone to see,” Nunes told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham Monday night.
By ‘taking care’ of the redactions, Nunes and others mean maximum, not total, declassification. Most agree that there will be some small core of information regarding the FBI’s sources and methods that should remain blacked out. But that would be a tiny part of the application compared to the redactions in place today.
Nunes and other House Republicans have been asking for declassification for months. On June 14, all the Republican members of the Intelligence Committee wrote to the president declaring, “Because DOJ and FBI continue to obstruct the committee’s investigation, it is time to put the facts in the public domain, consistent with the need to protect intelligence sources and methods.”
While the lawmakers support maximum declassification, they also gave the president another option: declassify two key sections of the application that Republicans believe are particularly revealing. In the letter, the GOP committee members made a very specific request.
“To enable the public to understand the DOJ’s and FBI’s basis for obtaining the FISA warrant and three subsequent renewals,” the lawmakers wrote, “we respectfully request that you declassify and release publicly, and in unredacted form, pages 10-12 and 17-34, along with all associated footnotes, of the third renewal of the FISA application on Mr. Page. The renewal was filed in June 2017 and signed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.”
So what is on pages 10-12 and 17-34? That is certainly a tantalizing clue dropped by the House Intel members, but it’s not clear what it means. Comparing the relevant sections from the initial FISA application, in October 2016, and the third renewal, in June 2017, much appears the same, but in pages 10-12 of the third renewal there is a slightly different headline — “The Russian Government’s Coordinated Efforts to Influence the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election” — plus a footnote, seven lines long, that was not in the original application.
As for pages 17-34, there appear to be, in the third renewal, new text and footnotes throughout the section headlined “Page’s Coordination with Russian Government Officials on 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Influence Activities.” (That is the same headline as the original application.) The Republican lawmakers ask that it be unredacted in its entirety, suggesting they don’t believe revealing it would compromise any FBI sources or methods.
Clearly, the GOP lawmakers believe pages 10-12 and 17-34 contain critical information, so it seems likely that the release of those pages would affect the current public debate over the FISA application. That would, in turn, lead to charges that the Republicans were cherry-picking the application and did not want the public to see information that undercuts their position.
Which is why the application should be released in its entirety, or as closely to its entirety as is possible. Will that happen? At the moment, it appears the only person who can answer that question is Trump.
