by Joe Callen
Rosemary Collyer, Presiding Judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), released an unprecedented statement on Tuesday slamming the FBI’s misconduct in surveilling the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election which occurred under the leadership of disgraced former FBI Director James Comey.
NBC News reported:
The secret court that approves orders to conduct surveillance on suspected foreign terrorists or spies issued a highly unusual public rebuke to the FBI on Tuesday, ordering the agency to say how it intends to correct the errors revealed last week by the Justice Department inspector general.
Rosemary Collyer, presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court, said the inspector general’s report “calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable.” She ordered the FBI to file a report by Jan. 10 on how it intends to remedy those mistakes.
In his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Inspector General Michael Horowitz expressed misgivings about the FBI’s errors and omissions in its requests for judicial approval to conduct surveillance on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
“We are deeply concerned that so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked investigative teams on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI,” Horowitz said.
Collyer wrote that the inspector general report showed “troubling instances in which FBI personnel provided information to NSD which was unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession.
“The FBI’s handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the OIG report, was antithetical to the heightened duty of candor described above….”
Collyer ordered the government to inform the Court in a sworn written statement by January 10, 2020, what it was going to do to ensure that misconduct and abuse of Court does not happen again in the future.
Collyer also ordered the government, in the next three days, “complete a declassification review of the above-referenced order of December 5, 2019, in anticipation of the FISC’s publishing that order. In view of the information released to the public in the OIG Report, the Court expects that such review will entail minimal if any redactions.”
Trump responded to the news by writing on Twitter: “Wow! ‘In a stunning rebuke of the FBI, the FISA court severly chastised the FBI for the FISA abuses brought to light in the recent Inspector General’s Report. There were at least 17 significant errors.’ @FoxNews Statement by the Court was long and tough. Means my case was a SCAM!”
Amen. A scam…yet he is being impeached tomorrow!
