Read it all here: The FISA Court’s Feeble Rebuke of the FBI Means The Court Should be Abolished. Excerpt:
A year and a half ago when the redacted FISA applications were first made public, it was obvious that the FBI relied almost entirely on Christopher Steele’s phony “dossier” and that the FISA court was being lied to. Back then, Collyer should have immediately ordered a “show cause contempt” hearing demanding that Comey, Sally Yates, Andrew McCabe, Dana Boente and Rod Rosenstein all appear before the court to explain why they should not be held in criminal contempt for deceiving judges in the four warrant applications they signed. They swore that the information was true and verified when they knew it was not. Collyer still isn’t ordering a contempt hearing. This is an appalling abdication of judicial duty.
It means that the FISA court doesn’t really care that it was lied to by the FBI. If it did, Collyer would hold these FBI & DOJ officials legally responsible for defrauding the court. The message here is this: you can lie to the FISA court and there will be no accountability or punishment. If you get caught, the court will merely demand remedies for the future.
This will not go over well in Congress among those who feel that FISA has become a serious and chronic danger to civil liberties. They are right. The currently constituted FISA court must be abolished. A new system should take its place –one that does not rely on the FBI to be honest and trustworthy because the bureau has proven that it cannot be.
The FBI was caught lying before back in 2002. In more than 75 cases, the FBI had deceived judges in sensitive surveillance warrants. Then-director Robert Mueller appeared before the FISA court and promised reforms. He vowed that it would never happen again.
Predictably, it has.
Strong letter to follow.
ReplyDeleteStronger letter to follow.
Still stronger letter to follow.
Strongest letter yet to follow.
Eventually, someone at FBI will get a papercut. Let that be a lesson to all who would subvert the secret judiciary in order to violate any American's civil liberties!
Ouch!
DeleteThe will look really mad after the strongest letter. Actually Collyer was warned about this in 2018 by Rep Nunes. She ignored it. She should be impeached.
Delete"It means that the FISA court doesn’t really care that it was lied to by the FBI."
ReplyDeleteWell, possibly. But it could be that one of the FISC judges was compromised and/or corrupt. Who was the judge who recused? Wasn't he a friend of Page? Maybe the FISA court was afraid of lifting up the edge of the rug, what with all the dirt and roaches they might find. Rosemary might have known for quite some time what's under the rug, but kept hoping it wouldn't be necessary to look. Now it's necessary, and it ought to be done quickly and thoroughly.
@DFinley
DeleteThe judge was Rudolph Contreras. Based on the article linked below it looks like both Page and Strzok knew 'Rudy'.
https://thefederalist.com/2018/03/16/revealed-peter-strzok-had-personal-relationship-with-recused-judge-in-michael-flynn-case/
Bongino also had some interesting observations today about the roles of the 'swearing agent' and the FISC judge. Nobody is let off the hook.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8-Vx7LDgxM&t=2065s
Today at CTH is a comment about Collyer:
ReplyDeleteTackleberry says: December 18, 2019 at 12:37 am
"Collyer isn’t just a Big Government, rubber stamp, Potemkin jurist (there to provide the illusion of oversight and guarding against government corruption), she was instrumental in ensuring the major mortgage lenders, largely responsible for the early-2000’s economic meltdown, never saw the inside of a jail cell, despite committing mortgage fraud, document forgery and perjury on a massive scale.
Under Dodd-Frank, and other Leftist, addle-headed monkeywrenches thrown into our economy, lenders made massive amounts of homeloans, to those who could never sustain mortgage payments, especially loans that would “balloon,” or massively increase in monthly installment costs (e.g. predatory lending).
Add to this the newish concept of treating mortgage debt, as something to be bundled and swamped in huge clumps called “pools”, the lenders shredded the original promissory notes, necessary to foreclose on an unpaid mortgage loan.
When the balloons hit, and the borrowers could not keep up the payments, the banks moved to foreclose, but couldn’t legally do so, without the blue-ink copies of the promissory note.
So what did they do? Went into the document forgery business, on an industrial scale. Lawyers and bank officers were forging documents by the million, foreclosure lawyers perjuring themselves millions of times nationally, and homes taken away from millions of defrauded mortgagors.
The Attorneys General of 49 states began investigations in as many states, into what would gently be called the “robo-signing” scandal, or called innoccouously called “foreclosure abuses.”
Bank lawyer-turned corrupt, gun-running, stonewalling Attorney General, Eric Holder, corralled all those investigations into one single National Mortgage Settlement, which let the Banksters off with a wrist slap, and no prison time.
Collyer? She made sure that enforcement of even the lax terms of the NMS was illusory."
aNanyMouse: Tackleberry, as far as I understand this matter, is spot-on, down to the last fleeing miscreant.
DeleteMy one quibble is that I'm not going to let the borrowers off the hook, many of whom had no business taking out mortgages.
Another rag-tag group were real estate speculators, a good many of them in Florida. They bought condos by the bushel, hoping to flip them in a few months. Alas, the collapse.
We are responsible for our actions, even when we are stupid and greedy.
Thanks for the informed post. And I used to think this Collyer judge was on the ball, as she wrote that excoriating memo many moons back.
Live and learn.
Well, didn't Adm Rogers already notify the FISC of funny business going on with FISA warrants, and the purpose to which the data was being used?? Was it Judge Collyer to whom he directed his missive? What ever became of Adm Rogers warning?
ReplyDeleteActually, that's different. It's a bit hard to explain. The NSA stuff is collected by NSA, and the FBI was searching NSA databases. The FBI wasn't required to write up separate FISA applications for that, but they were required to follow certain rules for accessing the databases and conducting searches. They flouted those rules--big time.
DeleteThat process is supervised by the FISC. The FISC took the info from Rogers and did a big report in which the FBI was accused of deliberate wrongdoing, extending back to 2012. The FISC report stated that at least 85% of FBI searches were unauthorized in one way or another, including allowing access by uncleared "contractors", i.e., political operatives.
Steps were taken by NSA, which simply shut down certain types of searches.
Wasn’t Rogers concerned about the 702 “about” searches - the ones for which there was no audit trail as to the identity(ies) of the person(s) doing the searches?
DeleteYes, I was referring to the 702 'about' searches. However, she did know the identities of the searchers--the private contractors are listed in her report/order, but are redacted.
DeleteSo Collyer wrote a report then, according to CTH, never bothering to ask why these illegal searches were taking place, and now that the why is apparent , she still can't bring herself to do more than write another report.
ReplyDeleteEven though she must know it's the same group.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/10/12/fisa-judges-collyer-and-boasberg-both-identified-nsa-databases-used-for-political-surveillance/
Something like that. Ultimately, it seems to me that SCOTUS may have to assert itself. Or Roberts.
ReplyDelete