For the past nine months, a senior Justice Department official has been reviewing FBI and DOJ compliance with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Now three Republican members of Congress want to know what he has learned.
Last March Attorney General Jeff Sessions appointed John Huber, U.S. Attorney for Utah, to investigate alleged “irregularities” in FISA compliance in the investigation of President Trump and his entourage for possible collusion with Russian state agents.
On Monday, Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio), Mark Meadows (North Carolina) and Doug Collins (Georgia) sent Huber a letter asking who he had interviewed, how many FISA applications he had reviewed, and how many documents he had looked at.
The Huber investigation was the by-product of the so-called Nunes memo, written by House intelligence committee chairman Rep. Devin Nunes last spring. This deservedly forgotten document claimed, on the basis of classified information, that a FISA warrant requested by the FBI to track one former Trump adviser (Carter Page) was politically motivated.
The purpose of the memo was to buttress Trump’s arguments that Mueller’s investigation of several dozen other Trump associates, was unfair.
Nunes’ credibility was already suspect because of his clownish performance defending Trump in March 2017. While denouncing leaks of classified information, Nunes was leaked classified information by the White House showing that the identity of an American picked up in conversation with Russian surveillance target had been “unmasked.” Nunes then did exactly what he accused his Trump’s critics of doing. He made classified information public.
Even worse for Nunes’s credibility was the identity of unmasked individual: Gen. Michael Flynn. In December 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI and started cooperating with Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. In other words, the target of government surveillance admitted he had engaged in criminal activity, which is was FISA warrants are supposed to uncover.
When the Nunes memo was finally released in March 2018, it was, by all accounts, a dud.
USA Today reported;
Most of the allegations in the Nunes memo had already been aired, and others were quickly discredited as misleading or undercut by other information that was excluded from the memo. Indeed, to the extent the document contained any surprises, it was the degree to which it actually undermined the attacks that the president and his allies had been advancing.
Even Sessions, a Trump appointee, saw no reason for the appointment of a special prosecutor, which requires “probable cause” that a crime has been committee.
Sessions appointed Huber to appease Trump’s defenders without giving any credence to Nunes’ unsupported claims.
While Trump’s House allies have consistently acted in bad faith, the idea of an independent review of FISA compliance is a good one. The partially declassified application for the Carter Page FISA warrant is the only such application to ever be made public in the 40-year history of the court.
Huber’s review could shed new light on FISA and create a precedent for more transparency and less partisanship around secret government practices.
You can read the letter to Huber here.
