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 |  "Putting on the Game Face" |
 This blog is a doorway into the mind of Percy Goodfellow. Don't be shocked at the lost boys of Namby-Pamby Land and the women they cavort with. Watch as his caricatures blunder about the space between audacious hope and the wake-up calls of tomorrow. Behold their scrawl on the CRT, like graffitti on a subway wall. Examine it through your own lens...Step up my friends, and separate the pepper from the rat poop. Welcome to my abode...the armpit of yesterday, the blinking of an eye and a plank to the edge of Eternity. Note: This blog is my journal. I've no interest in persuading anyone to adopt my views. What I write is whatever happens to interest me when I start pounding the keys. |
| Edward Klein has to be the best political writer of our era. His book All Out War, The Plot to Destroy Trump is must reading. To better understand the Horowitz Report, a reader needs some perspective on events proceeding the onset of the scandal. Chapters three and four provide that perspective Chapter 3 is titled "The Room of Requirement." In this chapter Klein introduces the reader to the world of a Judge in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court. This court consists of eleven judges, in courts spread across the United States. They are appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. One of these eleven is always on call duty, 24/7, in case of some type of National Emergency. The judges operate out of Federal Courthouses networked by state of the art telecommunications. Their offices are colocated with a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). It is a spy proof chamber. The Court oversees the granting of warrants to electronically surveil foreigners, not US citizens. The reason for having this court goes back to J Edgar Hoover and his abuses as Director of the FBI. Over the course of Hoover's career he became more and more powerful and abused his investigative powers surveilling and maintaining dossiers of notable US public figures including Rev Martin Luther King. With his passing Congress resolved to never again vest so much power in a bureaucrat and the FISA court came into being. Klein's source for Chapters 3 and 4 was a retired FISA Judge familiar with the Carter Page case. A unique aspect of the court is that the accused is not represented. The court relies upon the Government to be completely truthful in presenting all aspects of their petition. Room of the Requirement: The chapter starts out in the early summer of 2016. A FISA judge has his dinner interrupted by a telephone call. The caller says an emergency application has been received at the Local Courthouse. When the Judge arrives he meets with two attorneys from the Department of Justice (DOJ). They go into the SKIF. It has space for a Judge, a clerk and about a dozen people. The judge goes to his chambers to examine the warrant application. The National Security Agency had information that the Russian military had hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computers and the Gmail account of John Podesta, the chairman of the Hillary Clinton campaign. The judge was surprised. A FISA court is for getting warrants on foreigners not Americans. The main focus of this application was on Donald Trump and his campaign's ties to the Russians. The application specifically named Trump and three of his properties. It requested permission to intercept electronic records from two Russian banks who had communicated with an email address at Trump Towers. The judge had his clerk set up a conference call with several other FISA court judges. They agreed that the request did not meet the "Urgent" standard. There was no National Emergency and no proof connecting Donald Trump to the espionage. The Judge told the DOJ lawyers that since there was no imminent danger he would reschedule a hearing date for later in the week. The importance of this chapter is not to just provide background. The importance is to show that FISA judges do not live in a bubble. They regularly network with one another and in this particular instance, realized the political implications. This case was unusual, and precedent setting. It was one of the few FISA requests that ever got turned down, and raised a red flag that something fishy was going on. This was not a foreign entity being investigated but an American, not just any American, but a national political candidate who could become President of the United States. This was a scorching assertion. There are only 11 FISA Judges and assuming that 3 were in on the call, it follows that the rest would have soon been advised of it. These judges must have known something was afoot. Yet they hide behind the assertion, that because of the inaccuracies in the application they were totally in the dark. Chapter 4, Reverse Intelligence: In this chapter the reader gets to see what happened the following week. At the date and time appointed by the Judge, Sally Quillian Yates, Deputy Attorney General pulled up with attorneys for the FBI, DOJ, CIA, NSA and Director of National Intelligence. It must have been quite a squeeze getting everyone inside the SKIF. This was definitely the first sting of the Obama administration. They had an application signed by Attorney General Loretta Lynch The Judge heard oral arguments and closely questioned lawyers. The Lawyers requested approval of electronic surveillance, physical searches as well as other investigative techniques into the Russian Banks and any American connected to the focus of the search. The judge soon realized that these Americans referred to Donald Trump and associates , Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Roger Stone. The judge returned to his chambers and once again teleconferenced with several of his associates. In these discussions, "...it appeared that the government was being less than candid in its motive for the request. Irt was asking for permission to monitor suspected communication between foreign bank and a trump organization computer, but it was obviously seeking a backdoor way---known in CIA-ese---as "Reverse Intelligence"--- to monitor the activities of American Citizens..," including candidate Trump. An hour later the judge returned and announced he was rejecting the governments application. Again what this shows that Judges reviewing the original attempt to get a FISA application to spy on Donald Trump saw clearly the political implications and the potential for a partisan bias. Any claim by Chief Judge Rosemary Collyer that she was bamboozled by a vaguely filled out form, in the requests that followed simply doesn't hold water. At the present time FISA judge Rosemary Collyer is running around with her hair on fire, indignant that the FBI misled her on the Carter Page applications Much of her angst comes from the fact that she has been exposed as the person who signed the first warrant, after she should have been aware that politics were rampant in the process. Mark Levin called her to account for this belated concern, characterizing it as " too little too late. He claims that she had ignored warning signs for two and a half years specifically, a secret motion filed April 20 2017, by the Landmark Legal Foundation informing the Judge about "Irregularities." She should have known a year earlier. The motion stated that "...violations had occurred based on published reports back in April of 2017, and those exhibits were provided to the judge. Five days after we filed that [...], the judge ruled" to deny the request arguing there was "no matter pending before the court with respect to which such an appearance would be proper." In summary Levin has since said, " "And so Judge Collyer did not protect the federal judiciary, she did not protect her own courtroom, she did not protect the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," Levin said. "For more than 2.5 years, she allowed these perpetrators to get away with what they did. And she could have brought an end to this. She could have had an evidentiary hearing or a contempt hearing if you will, and she chose not to." |
| The secretive federal court that approved the surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page on Tuesday accused FBI agents of creating a misleading impression about their basis for requesting a warrant and ordered the bureau to overhaul its process. In a blistering order, a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) accused the bureau of providing false information and withholding materials that would have undercut its four surveillance applications. "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," Rosemary Collyer, presiding judge with the FISC, wrote in the order released by the court. The judge gave the FBI until Jan. 10 to provide the court a sworn statement detailing how it plans to overhaul its approach to future surveillance applications. The order comes after the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a report earlier this month on its investigation into the Trump campaign and the 2016 election, with Inspector General Michael Horowitz detailing a series of missteps taken during the investigation. The FBI said it would take more than 40 "corrective steps" in response to the watchdog report. The surveillance court judge said Tuesday that the inspector general report documented “troubling instances in which FBI personnel provided information to NSD [the National Security Division of the Justice Department] which was unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession." The judge also noted the report cited “several instances” in which the FBI sought to persuade the court that probable cause existed to believe Page was a Russian agent, but nonetheless withheld “information in their possession which was detrimental to their case." "The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable," Collyer wrote. "The FISC expects the government to provide complete and accurate information in every filing with the Court. Without it, the FISC cannot properly ensure that the government conducts electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes only when there is a sufficient factual basis." |
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