Did the FBI Lie to the FISA Court?American Spectator, Jul 23, 2018, Daniel J. Flynn
The FBI did not allow the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to do just that. Instead, the heavily-redacted application for a warrant to surveil U.S. citizen Carter Page obscures the source. It never says, at least in the unredacted portions, that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid operatives to dig dirt on Donald Trump.
This allows the warrant to talk of “research†and not “opposition research.†The warrant application shields the partisan origins of the “dossier†and talks of a “law firm†hiring the investigators. In reality, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC paid the law firm, which paid Fusion GPS, which paid Christopher Steele (and, given the reference to a “U.S. person†in the warrant, perhaps others — unless that “U.S. person†was, in fact, a U.K. person, which complicates the narrative of foreign interference) to conduct opposition research.
By using intermediaries to effectively launder dirty money clean, the Clinton campaign kept its name off of a story it generated — and dodged the whole intent of campaign finance laws in the process. The FBI, not wanting to undermine its case to the FISA court, similarly omitted that the material it presented to the court came from a political operative paid by the opponent of “Candidate #1.†It now omits the name of the agent bringing the application forth to the court. Judging by what we know about the various FBI employees involved in the investigation, the agent’s identity may prove similarly damning. Why redact the investigating agent’s name and not the subject of his or her investigation?
The date of the application also remains redacted, at least partially so. Although we see a stamp that indicates “2016†and “OCT,†we do not know the exact date. Christopher Steele reported findings to the FBI beginning in early July 2016. At some point before Election Day, the bureau and Steele reached an agreement, later voided, in which the FBI pledged to pay the former MI6 officer to continue his investigation. Surely the FBI knew by that point just who had been paying Steele, right? It is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, after all.
Read more:
https://spectator.org/did-the-fbi-lie-to-the-fisa-court/
