As laid out in the Nunes memo, the Justice Department was granted a FISA warrant to surveil former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page during the 2016 presidential election. The initial application, along with the renewals, relied in part, on unverified information compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.
In a thought-provoking piece for NBC THINK, Ladar Levison, the founder of the encrypted email service Lavabit, explains why a “secret, non-adversarial system of judicial review is an insufficient check to our intelligence agencies and law enforcement.”
Notably, Lavabit was once the email service of choice for Edward Snowden.
In the case of Carter Page, his private life was monitored, for almost a year, without his knowledge, and then placed on display for strangers at the FBI to peruse, all based on a suspicion that he was colluding with Russia. […] And yet, Page was never officially charged — suggesting that, even given the ability to surveil him in ways that might make the general public cringe, the FBI was never able to find enough evidence for a single crime.
It has become clear that a secret, non-adversarial system of judicial review is an insufficient check to our intelligence agencies and law enforcement. When express disagreement on a foreign policy issue — namely the current sanctions against Russia — form even part of the basis of an allegation which meets the bar for a probable cause warrant, there is something terribly wrong with the current system. […]
To date, the FBI and the FISC have failed to justify their surveillance of Carter Page. The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right of the accused to face their accuser, particularly when a court, like the FISC, has affirmed the accusation by granting a probable cause warrant. […]
These documents also tell us the FISC routinely includes authorization in their warrants for the government to surveil people in contact with their target, and people in contact with the contact; in a scheme referred to as “chaining,” these authorizations will include 2 or 3 “hops.”
Here’s the latest on Page…
As The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft previously reported, Fox News contributor Sarah Carter recently revealed to host Sean Hannity that the Department of Justice ignored Congressional requests to turn over the transcripts of the FISA court hearings on Carter Page.
Credit: Hannity
CARTER: The Department of Justice can easily give you the same documents that we have. This has never been requested before by the FISA Court. So this is a new thing for them. They have to review everything, decide whether or not they can hand over these documents. But she said that the court would not reject to the fact that the Department of Justice can hand them over. Well, I confirm tonight that Nunes and Goodlatte did request those documents from the Department of Justice and the Department of Justice never responded to them.