Justice Department audit finds widespread ‘flaws’ in FISA applications

  The Justice Department has already admitted that there were several mistakes made in the application for approval to spy on Carter Page, in fact they actually admitted that two of the FISA warrants were not even valid.

  This raises questions about how widespread the problem is and it turns out the process is not being followed properly in many cases. Here is more:

A Justice Department audit of the FBI’s use of secret surveillance warrants has found widespread problems with the law enforcement agency’s process for ensuring that facts are backing up the claims made to judges when seeking a warrant.

The finding of broader failings in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act program came in a review launched by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz after an earlier inquiry found numerous errors in applications to monitor former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. In a bid to assess whether the faults in the Page’s surveillance process were an aberration or a chronic problem, Horowitz’s audit team zeroed in on 29 applications for surveillance of U.S. citizens or green-card holders over a five-year period.

Horowitz found an average of 20 errors in each of the applications.

For each of the 29 applications, Horowitz’s team reviewed whether the “Woods procedures” for justifying an application were properly followed.

“We do not have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods Procedures in compliance with FBI policy, or that the process is working as it was intended to help achieve the ‘scrupulously accurate’ standard for FISA applications,” Horowitz wrote ina “management advisory” addressed to FBI Director Chris Wray.

One troubling finding in Horowitz’s ongoing audit: the files providing detailed support for four of the 29 applications reviewed were missing.

“We could not review original Woods Files for 4 of the 29 selected FISA applications because the FBI has not been able to locate them and, in 3 of these instances, did not know if they ever existed,” he wrote.

  That is very troubling indeed, especially the finding that in a few cases they could not even determine if the proper documents for requesting a FISA warrant ever existed.

  The FISA court is unconstitutional in the first place and it should not be reauthorized even if there was no abuse, but the abuse makes not reauthorizing the FISA court a no-brainer to anybody in the government who values liberty and freedom. But of course there are not many…

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium