FISA Court questions whether ‘information contained in other FBI applications is reliable’

Less than a week after Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz released his investigation detailing FBI misconduct in obtaining a FISA spy warrant on a Trump 2016 presidential campaign aide, the presiding judge of the FISA Court, Rosemary Collyer, issued a Four-Page Response Order on Dec. 17, 2019.Continue Reading

“There is such a range of conduct here that is inexplicable … Our final recommendation was to refer the entire chain of command,” DOJ Inspector General said

The newly released report by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, along with his groundbreaking testimony before Congress, noted the material failures of the FBI—“not only the operational team, but also of the managers and supervisors, including senior officials, in the chain of command”—with regard to the FISA warrant application on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.Continue Reading

FBI ‘misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts,’ and ignored unreliability of principal source

Attorney General William Barr gave an in-depth interview on Dec. 10 during a Wall Street Journal CEO Council conference, detailing material problems with the FBI’s FISA applications and the subsequent surveillance of members of the Trump campaign.Continue Reading

Justice Department Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz released his report on FISA abuse on Dec. 9, providing a condemnation of activities undertaken by the FBI.

The focus of the IG Report was abuse of the FISA process and the findings of the IG show numerous problems with the actions by FBI agents in obtaining the FISA warrant used to spy on Trump 2016 presidential campaign adviser Carter Page.Continue Reading

Kevin Clinesmith sent multiple text messages showing strong bias against Trump, including “Viva le resistance”

A former FBI attorney reportedly referred for criminal prosecution by Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz—for allegedly altering an email connected to the surveillance warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page—was assigned in early 2017 as “the primary FBI attorney assigned” to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into alleged Russian election interference.

The lawyer, who has been identified as Kevin Clinesmith in media reports, had been incorrectly portrayed by many members of the media as a “low-level” or junior member of the FBI’s legal team.Continue Reading

US Attorney John Durham reportedly ‘very interested’ in interviewing former CIA Director John Brennan and former DNI James Clapper

John Durham, the U.S. attorney tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016, is expected to seek an interview with former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper following an expansion of his investigation.

It was reportedly the meetings Durham and Attorney General William Barr recently had in Rome—where they obtained new evidence—that were the impetus for the broadening of the scope of the probe.Continue Reading

John Durham, the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI’s probe into the Trump campaign, has obtained two cell phones belonging to Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud.

Mifsud, who disappeared from public view shortly after his name was outed in the media in 2017, played a key role in events that led the FBI to investigate the Trump campaign. The news of the cell phones was first made known in an Oct. 15, 2019, filing by Sidney Powell, the attorney for Trump’s former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. In the motion, she requested that the U.S. Government be ordered to “produce evidence that has only recently come into its possession.”Continue Reading