Courts, Criminal law, Justice, Lawyering

FBI Agents Connected To Carter Page Surveillance Barred From FISA Process

In a further demonstration of the abuses that led to the surveillance of Trump officials, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court has barred FBI officials involved in the wiretapping of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page from appearing before the court. in rebuke that exceeded the remedial recommendations made by the independent monitor recently appointed by the court. Notably, this goes beyond the recommendations for David Kris, the highly controversial choice as an independent monitor of reforms. The order of Judge Boasberg further belies arguments that the surveillance of the Trump-relate figures was well-based and justified, as I discussed in any earlier column.

Boasberg declared “FBI personnel under disciplinary review in relation to their work on FISA applications accordingly should not participate in drafting, verifying, reviewing, or submitting such applications to the Court while the review is pending. The same prohibition applies to any DOJ attorney under disciplinary review, as well as any DOJ or FBI personnel who are the subject of a criminal referral related to their work on FISA applications.”

We will have to wait to see if there are meaningful reforms of this court. Boasberg made a baffling mistake in the appointment of Kris. Moreover, this is not a permanent ban. Most importantly, Sen. Rand Paul is being opposed in his efforts to put serious protections in place, including opposition from the Justice Department.

115 thoughts on “FBI Agents Connected To Carter Page Surveillance Barred From FISA Process”

  1. Pingback: Usher’s News & Analysis, Mar. 7, 2020 | PropertyPak.com®

  3. The alphabet soup has been weaponized. We should do something about this while we can.

  4. When will the pundits and the media ever start talking about what a truly bad president Barack Obama was and what a remarkably corrupt administration he presided over?

  6. “But DOJ attorney Courtney Enlow responded to those concerns by arguing that Barr wrote the letter in  “good faith,” adding that he was under no obligation to release even a redacted version of the report under the current special counsel regulations. Furthermore, Enlow argued that the redactions were made by Barr and attorneys from the special counsel’s office working in concert with one another.”
    – From Law and Crime, Aug. 5, 2019.
    **********
    Representatives from the Special Counsel’s team worked jointly on the redactions with the DOJ prior to the public release of the Mueller Report.

  7. FBI agents who failed to disclose all relevant evidence to the court under oath will be barred from appearing before a federal court that’s about to lose its authorization to exist? Why not disbar those FBI agents who are also lawyers from practicing law in the future? Why not refer these lying FBI agents to the local federal DA for criminal prosecution? No wonder most Americans’ heads are spinning when they learn what passes for justice in today’s legal system.

  8. Judge Slams Barr, Orders Review Of Mueller Report Deletions

    NOTE: This is expanded coverage of the ruling today issued by Federal Judge Walton regarding a Freedom of Information request co Corning The Mueller Report
    ………………………………………………………..

    Walton issued his decision in connection with two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits seeking the report and related records. One was brought by BuzzFeed and its reporter Jason Leopold. The other was filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

    Justice Department lawyers asked that the judge bless the deletions from the report based on a declaration submitted by a department official. But Walton declined to do so and demanded that the department provide him an unredacted copy of the report by March 30, so he could see exactly what was deleted.

    “These circumstances generally, and Attorney General Barr’s lack of candor specifically, call into question Attorney General Barr’s credibility and in turn, the Department’s representation that ‘all of the information redacted from the version of the [Mueller] Report released by [ ] Attorney General [Barr]’ is protected from disclosure by its claimed FOIA exemptions,” Walton wrote.

    Walton’s claim that Barr displayed a “lack of candor” is likely to reverberate loudly within the Justice Department. That phrase has unusual weight in federal law enforcement, where such an accusation can and does result in dismissal. “Lack of candor” is specifically what former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was accused of before being fired by Barr’s predecessor, Jeff Sessions, in 2018.

    Edited From: “Judge Slams Barr, Orders Review Of Mueller Report Deletions”

    Today’s Politico

    2. Let’s not forget Mueller was asked to help in reviewing the Mueller Report and its deletions. He didn’t. Let’s not forget that before Mueller made a fool of himself before the world Barr gave him a way out. Democrats like to hang onto anything even when worthless, fabricate new facts and make it grow so they actually have something to hang onto even thought it is a blatant lie.

      People like Paint Chips try to cover up their garbage. In an earlier discussion Paint Chips tried to cover up his ignorance of studies by using self created studies written by advocates to attack a study of almost 1 million people in the well regarded BJOM.

      1. Why doesn’t Allan shut up about “Paint Chips.” What a fool Allan is.

  9. Federal Judge Rules That Attorney General Barr Misrepresented Mueller Report

    A federal judge on Thursday sharply criticized Attorney General William P. Barr’s handling of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, saying that Mr. Barr put forward a “distorted” and “misleading” account of its findings and lacked credibility on the topic.

    Mr. Barr could not be trusted, Judge Reggie B. Walton said, citing “inconsistencies” between the attorney general’s statements about the report when it was secret and its actual contents that turned out to be more damaging to President Trump. Mr. Barr’s “lack of candor” called into question his “credibility and, in turn, the department’s” assurances to the court, Judge Walton said.

    The judge ordered the Justice Department to privately show him the portions of the report that were censored in the publicly released version so he could independently verify the justifications for those redactions. The ruling came in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking a full-text version of the report.

    The differences between the report and Mr. Barr’s description of it “cause the court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller report to the contrary,” wrote Judge Walton, an appointee of President George W. Bush.

    Edited From: “Judge Calls Barr’s Handling Of Mueller Report ‘Distorted’ And ‘Misleading’

    Today’s New York Times
    ……………………………………………………..

    This development seems to bear out what was widely suspected: ‘William Barr deliberately misrepresented The Mueller Report’

    Allow me to wager that Professor Turley ignores this development in tomorrow’s columns. Expect instead another ‘tyranny from the left’ story; like someone was ridiculed for wearing a MAGA hat.

    1. MORE FROM ABOVE:

      Judge Walton’s decision focuses on the period last spring between the delivery of the Mueller report to the attorney general, his publicly issued summary of it two days later that drew widespread condemnation and the release of the report itself a month later that revealed several discrepancies between the documents.

      Among those Judge Walton cited: Mr. Barr’s obfuscation about the scope of the links that investigators found between the Trump campaign and Russia, and how the report documented numerous episodes that appear to meet the criteria for obstruction of justice, echoing the complaints of many critics of Mr. Barr’s summary of the report.

      The attorney general issued an initial four-page letter in March 2019 — two days after receiving the 381-page Mueller report — that purported to summarize its principal conclusions. But within days, Mr. Mueller sent letters to Mr. Barr protesting that he had distorted its findings and asking him to swiftly release the report’s own summaries. Instead, Mr. Barr made the report public only weeks later, after a fuller review to black out sensitive material.

      Among the issues Judge Walton flagged: Mr. Barr declared that the special counsel had not found that the Trump campaign had conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, and left it at that.

      But while Mr. Mueller did conclude that he found insufficient evidence to charge any Trump associates with conspiring with the Russians, Mr. Barr omitted that the special counsel had identified multiple contacts between Trump campaign officials and people with ties to the Russian government and that the campaign expected to benefit from Moscow’s interference.

      1. The report’s been public for months, Peter. You’ve just seen someone spend $500,000,000 to win American Samoa’s delegates. What do you think $100,000 in Facebook ads is going to get you.

        Yes, we noticed this is the same Democrat judge whose been making a hash of the Flynn case.

        1. Absurd: you have no idea what you’re talking about. Judge Walton was appointed by George W. Bush. You should step out of the rightwing bubble now and then. Or at least read articles before commenting.

          1. “Judge Walton was appointed by George W. Bush.”

            Republican Presidents have appointed some awful judges that hid their true ideologies. Democrats even threaten judges. ‘Centrist’ Democrat leader Charles Schumer even threatened two Supreme Court Justices the other day. Of course Democrats threaten everyone whether it be in the streets, Antifa, or in the halls of Congress like Maxine Waters. They even threaten Congressmen at the baseball diamond and almost killed Steve Scalise and could have killed many more.

            The left is inherently violent and getting moreso because they have not been been censored by their own. In fact they have been praised for their wokeness. The left likes to blame the right for such violence but those are frequently leftists called right wingers for Democratic convenience. All one has to do is look at what most of them support which is left wing causes and more government.

      2. Wow, Paint Chips isn’t keeping up with the news and neither is the NYTimes. Walter Duranty is dead but the NYTImes still has the Pulitzer for phony reporting that they refuse to give up.

        The question is will Paint Chips provide a reason for me to give the address of the article from the BJOP? Will he comment on it? He found old disproven news written as new news and he sucks it up but not to a peer reviewed journal from the other side of the Atlantic. That can’t be because it disagrees with what he has been fed.

      1. I think we need to see an unredacted version of Judge Walton’s ruling if he insists on an unredacted Mueller Report.

        1. https://jonathanturley.org/2019/04/18/federal-judge-attacks-barr-over-creating-public-doubts-over-report/
          ********
          This is a link to Prof. Turley’s column, written nearly a year ago.
          Judge Walton was criticizing the redactions BEFORE the Mueller Report was even released by the DOJ.
          I don’t know what arguments were made to Judge Walton by different sides from the time this column was published in April 2019 to the time that Judge Walton just announced his decision.
          I’m not sure it would have matter, given that Walton seemed to decide back in April 2019 that Barr must have inappropriately redacted parts of the Mueller Report.
          Ideally, that’s not the kind of bias you want to see from a judge right from the start.

  10. This site is one of the most functionally disorganized sites when it comes to threads on a chat msg bb I’ve every used. Yes, I thank the host, but he picks the topic & then the thread wonders off in a 1000 different directions………

    Never mind….. Rossanna Danna Oky1… lol

    The Deep State, in part of our govt, has been & is getting us Harmed, imo. AKA, they’ve went full retard.

    https://banned.video/watch?id=5e61749ff40ae500aa048732

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