Without Consequences or Penalties, FISA Should Expire

[Bigun]

Without Consequences or Penalties, FISA Should Expire

Most Americans no longer have faith in the government and political apparatus that fortifies the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Republican lawmakers shouldn’t either.

By Julie Kelly - March 5, 2020

Two years ago, a controversial memo first alerted the public to the politicized use of a secret court to spy on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. At the time, most Americans—myself included—knew next to nothing about the clandestine workings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Most Americans trusted that the law enforcement, intelligence, and judicial “experts” involved in the process took the utmost care with their duties and sought a diligent application of the law to protect cherished constitutional rights while keeping us safe.

After all, most Americans had defended these surveillance tools as necessary weapons in the war on terror after the attacks on September 11, 2001. The notion that such a powerful, intrusive means of collecting information from suspected foreign terrorists instead would be weaponized against a volunteer for the wrong political campaign—a private U.S. citizen—was so far fetched that it would have bordered on tinfoil hat conspiracy nonsense conceived by the deepest corners of the far Left or Right had anyone said it out loud.

That’s why, when then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) issued his February 2018 memo detailing how Barack Obama’s Justice Department presented unproven political opposition research—the “Steele dossier”—as evidence to the FISA court in order to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, many detractors accused Nunes of acting as a “deep state” conspiracy theorist. (The FBI, by the way, objected to the memo’s release.)

Journalists and pundits on the Left howled that Nunes was promoting a Fox News-manufactured conspiracy theory lacking veracity. “Instead of evidence, the memo engages in the same dark and misleading conspiracy theories that have characterized other efforts by President Trump’s allies to discredit the Russia investigation,” wrote New York Times columnist David Leonhardt in January 2018...

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/05/without-consequences-or-penalties-fisa-should-expire/

Cyber Note:  Link fixed.

-- excerpt, rest at link above --

This is a really good article including the comments.

[Bigun]

FBI Director Christopher Wray is more concerned with reminding the public about the “good men and women of the FBI” than with making penance for his agency’s sins.

His reply to the court is filled with bland bureaucratese, but no remedy can cure the afflictions of a department plagued by arrogance and immune from accountability. An FBI agent attested that the FISA applications were “true and correct” under penalty of perjury. The Justice Department recently concluded at least two of the four applications are unlawful. Yet no perjury charges appear forthcoming.

This leads to the ongoing investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham into the illicit probe of the Trump campaign and other potential criminality between Election Day and Inauguration Day. It’s been 10 months since Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham to manage the inquiry; not a single charge has yet been filed.

The Republican-led Senate has completely abdicated its duty to hold the executive branch accountable.

“A.G. Barr advocating for ‘clean renewal’ of Patriot Act without any legislation to reform FISA is a disservice to @realDonaldTrump and should be roundly defeated,” Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tweeted last week. “The secret FISA court should be forbidden from allowing spying on political campaigns ever again—period!”

The question of whether to reapprove any part of FISA right now is simple: No. Every institution tasked with safeguarding this process has violated the public’s trust. The FBI, the court itself, the Senate, and yes, Barr’s Justice Department have failed to restore that trust despite plenty of time and opportunity to do so.