Audit of FISA Applications Provide More Evidence of Political Motivation for Carter Page Warrants

In the aftermath of the DOJ's Inspector General finding material finding "apparent errors or inadequately supported facts" in the DOJ's FISA applications to surveil Carter Page, the DOJ undertook a comprehensive review of practices to determine whether those errors were common or uncommon.

The answer to that question would help determine whether the Carter Page warrants were politically motivated or not. If those errors are common, for example, then the FBI is systematically riding roughshod over Americans' rights so that they can get secret warrants issued and surveil anyone and everyone they possibly can.

If, on the other hand, those errors were unique to Carter Page, then the FBI is generally by the book, but for some reason, in this case, they broke the rules so that they could procure a warrant. Conservatives will argue that the reason was politically motivated.

Benjamin Wittes from the Lawfare Blog put it well: "If the FBI botched its applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Mr. Page because of political bias, after all, problems of the sort Mr. Horowitz identified are most likely unique to this case."

In the first phase of the review, the Horowitz audited 29 FBI applications to the FISA court and found "widespread problems" including deficient documentation in 4 of the 29 and "apparent errors or inadequately supported facts" in the remaining 25. The discovery that every one of the reviewed applications had problems (an average of 20 issues/application) supports the position that the FBI's application process is awful and the Carter Page warrants were not politically biased but just business as usual.

The next phase of the investigation would look more closely at the errors and determine if they were material or not--if they resulted in warrants that should not have been granted. They determined that "nearly all of the inaccuracies" were minor. 

This supports the argument that the FISA warrants against Page and the errors committed to guarantee them were politically motivated.

Furthermore, it is worthwhile to compare the errors found in the comprehensive audit to those in the Carter Page warrants. 

From the audit:

"The FBI stressed in its new filing that many of the apparent mistakes it identified were minor, involving typographical errors, agents using the wrong dates for underlying documents or misidentifying underlying documents."

From the original review of the Carter Page warrants:

"The errors in the FISA applications on Carter Page were significant and serious. They were not, in my experience, the kind of errors you would expect to find in every case. ... It’s not acceptable to rely on a Confidential Human Source and then not check with his FBI handler in describing his bona fides to the FISA Court. It’s not acceptable to omit some potentially exculpatory recorded statements made by the FISA target to a source. It’s not acceptable to leave unresolved credibility and perhaps factual disputes between a key source and his primary subsource. It’s not acceptable, after closing the key source, to continue to get information from him through an Office of the Deputy Attorney General (ODAG) staffer, thereby effectively treating him as a subsource of the ODAG staffer. And it’s certainly not acceptable for an FBI attorney to alter an email from another intelligence community agency as to whether the other agency had contact with the FISA target or treated him as a source. (Internal citations omitted.)"

I will leave it to the reader to decide for themselves if the errors in the Carter Page applications were similar to those found in the subsequent audit, and if not, what was the driving force that led to the errors in the former.

Questions the Media should have asked about Buzzfeed Bombshell

For those who don't read or watch the news continuously, there was a 24-hour explosion in the Impeach Trump saga, that started with a bang on Thursday and ended with a whimper on Friday.

It began when BuzzFeed, the vaunted news source that brought us the as yet unverified Trump dossier, published a story, from anonymous sources no less, that Trump directed his lawyer to lie to Congress.

It ended when the Office of the Special Counsel disputed, in general terms, the thrust of the BuzzFeed story.

But this was not before it was reported by everyone CNN,

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/trump-russia-cohen-moscow-tower-mueller-investigation

The core of the story can be summarized by three paragraphs:

"Now the two sources have told BuzzFeed News that Cohen also told the special counsel that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement.

The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office."

On Friday evening, before Mueller's team shot back, I started to ask some questions that I realized that the media should have been asking. Namely, 1) What was the motivation for leaking this story and 2) Why BuzzFeed and not the NY Times.

On Question 1, suppose you are on Mueller's team investigating this. You believe that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress and you believe you have the proof to back it up. Since the investigation already has what it needs, and it's still going through the normal investigative process to be followed up by the prosecutorial process, what reason do you have to tell the media? It will be given to the media in due course, as soon as Mueller finishes his report.

The most likely reason I could think of was that the sources must NOT have believed it was going to see the light of day for whatever reason. Most likely because the evidence was too weak. (This turns out to be even more likely considering the Mueller dispute).

The second question I asked was why these sources would talk to BuzzFeed instead of the New York Times or Washington Post, for example. Why not go to a much more credible and established news outlet. This information was absolutely enormous and consequential. If I thought it was important enough to get into the news, I'd go straight to the top, why didn't these sources? Again, the likely answer is that they did not want the scrutiny from those sources or they knew it would be called into question and did not want to sully either of those companies.

I admit that maybe there are good reasons I didn't think of, but my point is that these are important questions that the media should have asked, but they did not. Probably because they prefer to breathlessly report bad news for Trump than to actually do their jobs.

Update: I heard a viable reason to leak the news. The timing of the presidential election and the investigation will make it difficult to complete impeachment proceedings before election day if they wait until the investigation is complete. Leaking gives Congress a reason to begin immediately. This was suggested in the 18 hours between the initial story and the Mueller rebuttal, and so is now moot. Even if true, this shows that the leakers were trying to short-circuit the investigative process and does not explain why Buzzfeed.