The heavily redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant applications to wiretap former Trump campaign aide, Carter Page, released over the weekend, don’t reveal much that wasn’t already known. The president’s tweets about the release, however, are wildly misleading and seemingly demonstrate that he doesn’t understand, or has willfully misunderstood and misrepresented, the FISA applications, the investigation into Russian meddling, and how the two are connected to him.
[READ: All the declassified FISA documents on Carter Page]
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has pushed back on these tweets. On CNN, Rubio explained that he didn’t think the FBI did anything wrong in wiretapping Page saying, “I think they went to the court and got the judges to approve it.” Rubio added that the FBI “knew who he was before the campaign. Then you see the guy gravitating around a leading campaign, and then other things came up on the screen, and said, ‘we’ve got to look at this guy.’ That’s what the FISA application lays out.”
Here’s a look at why Rubio is right to push back on the president:
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted “Looking more & more like the Trump Campaign for President was illegally being spied upon (surveillance) for the political gain of Crooked Hillary Clinton and the DNC.”
On Wednesday, Trump doubled down on this claim, tweeting: “So we now find out that it was indeed the unverified and Fake Dirty Dossier, that was paid for by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the DNC, that was knowingly & falsely submitted to FISA and which was responsible for starting the totally conflicted and discredited Mueller Witch Hunt!”
The only problem with these assertions is that they are not true. For one thing, the investigation into Russian meddling in the election did not begin with Carter Page, but with George Papadopoulos. For another, Muller was appointed by the Justice Department in May 2017 whereas the date of the first FISA application to wiretap Page is dated October 2016. Perhaps most importantly, Carter Page was not illegally wiretapped.
Based on his tweets Trump also seems to have confused an investigation into Carter Page’s ties to Russia and an investigation into him and his legitimacy as president.
Let’s be clear, there is a legitimate role for the government of a sovereign nation to investigate instances of foreign involvement or manipulation. Indeed, as the FBI’s application to wiretap Page highlights, Russia has tried to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere since the 1960’s, when it was the USSR. Evidence of such interference is indeed a concern for the U.S. government and should be investigated.
Moreover, these investigations cannot just occur on a whim or at the behest of partisan operatives. In the United States, for an agency like the FBI to conduct such an investigation against a citizen, an application must be presented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and granted by judges after a review of the evidence. If the court finds that there is probable cause such that it justifies infringing on the rights of a private citizen, then for the investigation to continue, a new application must be filed and approved every 90 days where the judges must again review the evidence presented and again grant approval.
What seems to be at issue over the wiretapping of Carter Page does not seem to be whether he acted as a Russian agent, but rather the use of a dossier on Trump compiled by Christopher Steele and, crucially, funded by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic party, to justify this accusation — despite the dossier being just one aspect of several pages outlining the evidence against Page including the applications.
In several tweets on the released application, Trump only says that “Carter Page wasn’t a spy, wasn’t an agent of the Russians” once and only then as a quote from Tom Fitton. Instead, his attention is on the dossier.
Interestingly, the Trump campaign had earlier tried to distance itself from Page with Trump saying at one point, “I don’t think I’ve ever met him.” By the time that an application for surveillance of Page was filed, Page had already parted ways from the campaign. This timeline reaffirms that his quoting of Fitton notwithstanding, Trump can’t separate the investigation into Page from an investigation into his presidency.
[Byron York: FISA warrant application supports Nunes memo]
Although most of the document is redacted, the application outlines the probable cause necessary for surveillance of Page. The report concludes, “the FBI submits that there is probable cause to believe that Page [redacted portion] knowingly engage in clandestine intelligence activities (other than intelligence gathering activities) for or on behalf of such foreign power, or knowingly conspires with other persons to engage in such activities and, therefore, is an agent of a foreign power as defined by [law].” The application adds, “the FBI submits that there is probably cause to believe that such activities involve or are about to involve violations of the criminal statutes of the United States.”
The discussion of the dossier is a sideshow. In the application, the FBI acknowledges that the dossier was linked to attempts to discredit Trump but finds the reporting credible writing: “Notwithstanding Source #1’s reason for conducting the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia, based on Source #1’s previous reporting history with the FBI, whereby Source #1 provided reliable information to the FBI, the FBI believes Source #1’s reporting herein to be credible.”
The court found this, and more importantly the sum of the evidence most of which remains redacted, convincing. For this to be a witch hunt, everyone who signed off on the application in its various forms and the judges who signed off on it would have to be personally after the president.
Rubio is right to call out the president. Hopefully, other Republicans will join him.
