by WorldTribune Staff, July 22, 2018
A government watchdog group is urging President Donald Trump to step in and declassify 412 pages of top-secret documents related to surveillance conducted against former Trump campaign chairman Carter Page.
The documents revealed that the Department of Justice and FBI relied heavily on the Democrat-funded Steele dossier in the FISA application to spy on Page.
“These documents are heavily redacted but seem to confirm the FBI and DOJ misled the courts in withholding the material information that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC were behind the ‘intelligence’ used to persuade the courts to approve the FISA warrants that targeted the Trump team,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said.
“The warrants are controversial because the FISA court was never told that the key information justifying the requests” came from the dossier, the Judicial Watch statement noted.
“Given this corruption, President Trump should intervene and declassify the heavily redacted material.”
The documents include an October 2016 application and three renewal applications for FISA warrants taken out against Page.
Judicial Watch, along with several news outlets, obtained the applications through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.
“The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government,” reads the FISA application.
“As discussed above, the FBI believes that Page has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government,” reads the initial FISA application, dated Oct. 21, 2016. The Justice Department and FBI obtained three additional FISAs in January, April and June 2017.
The application also says that the FBI had probable cause to believe that Page engaged in “clandestine intelligence activities” and is an agent of a foreign power.
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes has revealed that the DOJ and FBI relied heavily on the unverified dossier by ex-British spy Christopher Steele in the FISA applications.
The dossier is the first piece of evidence cited in the FISA application section laying out the allegations that Page coordinated with Russian government officials on election-related “influence activities.”
Judicial Watch calls on Trump to declassify ‘heavily redacted’ FISA court documents added by World Tribune on
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