The FISA warrant and the Russian hoax

Andrew McCarthy:

Maybe this week . . . maybe next week. We’re led to believe President Trump is on the verge of revealing more of the currently redacted information from the Carter Page FISA-warrant papers.

This would be a welcome development. When it comes to the supposed factual basis on which the FBI and Justice Department sought a national-security eavesdropping warrant — alleging that Page was an agent of the Kremlin and that the Trump campaign was complicit in Russia’s hacking conspiracy — the more transparency the better.

Page has never been charged with any crime, much less with espionage. That is a salient fact because to get a FISA warrant on an American citizen, the FBI is required to show that the citizen’s activities on behalf of a foreign power violate federal criminal law. The FBI and Justice Department went to the FISA court four times over nine months, from October 2016 through June 2017, claiming to have grounds that Page was involved in heinous clandestine activity. Why isn’t he in handcuffs?

I believe it is because they never had a case. All they appear to have had were the 2013 attempt by Russian spies to recruit Page as an asset, and the Steele dossier. If I’m right about that, this would be problematic for the bureau, for two reasons.

First, Page seems to have cooperated in the FBI and DOJ’s prosecution of the Russian operatives, and — both back then and in the ensuing years — to have made himself available pretty much whenever the FBI wanted to interview him. Page has said lots of stupid things about the supposed virtues of appeasing Putin’s anti-American regime, but he is also an Annapolis grad and former U.S. naval intelligence officer. It is not a crime to be targeted for recruitment (by a spy who concluded Page was “an idiot”), to have invested in the Russian energy sector, or to have loopy political views.

Second, the Steele dossier is a compendium of foreign-supplied, rank-hearsay opposition research sponsored by the Clinton campaign. It was never corroborated by the FBI (even though there are guidelines forbidding the bureau from presenting unverified information to the FISA court), and several of its key allegations have been convincingly refuted. It is, furthermore, the subject of libel lawsuits, in defense against which the author — former British spy (and rabid anti-Trump partisan) Christopher Steele — has shrunk from claiming his allegations are true, describing them merely as “raw intelligence” that was “unverified” and needed to be investigated. (Now he tells us.)
...
It was a scam from the beginning to the end and only some seriously unhinged Democrats and media outlets still bitterly cling to this hoax.  Release the redacted portion and expose the basis, if any, for the fraud on the court and the participation of the FBI and DOJ in a scandalous attempt to overturn an election.

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