drcrinum said:

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https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/02/latest-inspector-general-report-slams-comeys-fbi-for-massive-failures-to-document-fisa-claims/

Good read on the FISA abuse problem & how the Left is attempting to spin it.

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drcrinum said:

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https://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/make-no-mistake-the-mueller-investigation-was-all-about-flynn/

Good read on Flynn, written by a close colleague. Flynn wanted to audit the intelligence community (think CIA) -- too many people were opposed to that going back to the days when he was DIA Director for Obama.

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ruddyduck said:

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drcrinum said:

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ruddyduck said:

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Bye Felicia. Now what about Ciaramella & Vindman?

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Rockdoc said:

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Yeah, and I saw where tonight Schiff is already putting out quotes trashing Trump over this. What a *****. I hope he goes down some day.

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Rapier108 said:

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Rockdoc said:

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Yeah, and I saw where tonight Schiff is already putting out quotes trashing Trump over this. What a *****. I hope he goes down some day.

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He had those quotes written months ago, just waiting to release them because it was inevitable that Atkinson was going to be fired.

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Pinche Abogado said:

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I was pretty shocked after reading the order. Total punt.

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FISA is like that. Whatever it is the judges are running, it's not a judicial proceeding. More like what Fielding Melish would call "a travesty of a mockery of a sham . . . "

The FISA follies continued this week with what is being portrayed as the latest shiner for an FBI that is running out of eyes to blacken. Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz's new scathing report, following on his previous scathing report, describes his office's audit of FBI warrant applications submitted by the Justice Department to the secret court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In large part, Horowitz's new report is an audit of what turns out to be a flawed internal audit the FISA process being so thoroughly flawed that even its self-policing mechanisms are a joke.

The result, at the risk of further overplaying my baseball analogy, is that the bureau is batting nearly a thousand (or, depending on your perspective, nearly .000). Virtually every one of the over 70 applications the IG selected for scrutiny a representative sampling of five years' work by eight busy FBI field offices going back to 2014 was rife with errors: assertions that were unverified and apparently unsupported, flat-out inaccuracies, and typographical errors so blatant they elucidate that no one is reading these applications very carefully.



And that's really the point. My meticulous NR colleague David Harsanyi is quite right to point out that, on the record the bureau and the Justice Department have compiled going back to the Carter Page surveillance fiasco that undergirded the Trump-Russia collusion caper, what we are seeing cannot be dismissed as mere sloppiness. It smacks of corruption. But that said, the elephant in the room remains the FISA court. Not that it is corrupt, but that it is institutionally unfit for the oversight role FISA contemplates. That invites corruption and sloppiness.

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aseball would not work, it would not be baseball, if the umpires and the defense were the same team. Yet that is the FISA arrangement. The judges are still in their robes, just like the umps in my outlandish analogy still wear their blue suits, maintaining the appearance of independence. But they are not performing a judicial role. They can't be. Foreign-intelligence collection is not a judicial function.

FISA makes the court an advisory participant. Judges, instead, are supposed to be objective arbiters. In our system, they are not permitted to give advisory opinions to the political branches. Their role is to stand impartial between two adversaries one of whom is often the government. Their role is to decide only cases and controversies based on concrete factual records of alleged wrongdoing including wrongdoing by the government's political branches.

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How many times did we hear the FBI's apologists say the Carter Page warrants must have been on the up and up because four different judges signed off on them? We now know the warrant applications were rife with improprieties. But when the Bureau and the Justice Department were stonewalling, they relied on the judicial imprimatur to rationalize withholding information from congressional investigators.

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I would also add serious automatic penalties for any agent submitting unverified info as facts, included loss of job and pension with possible jail time if an FISA target received jail time base on info gather from an improper FISA application. Without penalties for abuse it will never stop.

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aggiehawg said:

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benchmark said:

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How many times did we hear the FBI's apologists say the Carter Page warrants must have been on the up and up because four different judges signed off on them? We now know the warrant applications were rife with improprieties. But when the Bureau and the Justice Department were stonewalling, they relied on the judicial imprimatur to rationalize withholding information from congressional investigators.

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Good read and thanks for posting. Everyone with a nose smelled the FISA stench 3 yrs ago. What's the fix?

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The biggest point here is that Andy McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor (Blind Sheikh case). He thought that FISA was important in fighting terrorism. So if even he is so disgusted by what has been revealed, that is notable.

The fix? Well, IMO, an appointed "defense counsel" like a guardian ad litem for the target of the FISA would be a good start. Their sole job would be to review and question the entire application and Woods Procedures file and present their findings to the FISC. These would not be DOJ lawyers on DOJ payroll but from ODNI, a separate agency.

My .02.

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I was thinking the same thing. They could be DOJ, but they'd have to report up through the DOJ IG rather than through CI.

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