The FISA applications omit the fact that a Russian intelligence officer called page ‘an idiot,’ " one congressional source said. The official spoke only on condition of anonymity due to the still-classified nature of the information.
Former FBI officials and agents with experience in FISA warrants say the affidavits for Page appear to be “material misrepresentations” and failed to properly follow so-called Woods Procedures requiring accuracy of facts by the sworn declarants. Those procedures were strengthened in 2003 by then-FBI director Robert Mueller, now the special counsel pursuing the Trump-Russia affair.
Withholding material and exculpatory evidence from the FISA applications may also have violated Page’s Fourth Amendment protections against omissions of material facts that would undermine or negate probable cause to search.
“It is illegal,” said veteran FBI agent Michael Biasello. “The affiant" -- the person swearing to the affidavit -- "cannot cherry-pick only information favorable to the case.”
n preparing its case for the FISA court, the FBI struggled to find credible evidence to support a probable cause argument for spying on Page, a U.S. citizen, a well-placed source briefed on the matter said. Evidence that he was acting as an agent of the Kremlin was thin. Headquarters leaned heavily on an unverified tip in the Steele dossier that Page had secretly met with two Kremlin-tied officials sanctioned by the U.S. -- Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin -- to hatch a plot to interfere in the election during a July 2016 trip to Moscow.
But the only part of that sensational accusation the bureau could corroborate was that Page had traveled that month to Moscow, where he gave an academic speech at a business college that also once hosted President Obama. Intent on securing the warrant to probe the Trump campaign for illicit ties to Moscow, the agency scrambled to show the court other Russian connections. As a result, the source said, Page’s role in the 2013 espionage case in New York was "exaggerated to make it look like he was being groomed by Russian intelligence.”
I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am,” the FBI secretly recorded one of the Russians, Victor Podobnyy, saying to another Russian about Page on April 8, 2013. “You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself.”
fter realizing he’d been duped, Page told RCI he met with Monaghan and other FBI agents at New York’s Plaza Hotel in June 2013 “to provide support” for their investigation. He met with them again, as well as prosecutors, in March 2016, to help put away one of the Russian agents, who agreed to plead guilty to espionage charges.
The FBI's attitude toward Page turned hostile after candidate Donald Trump publicly announced his name on March 21, 2016 along with other members of his foreign policy team. Only then was Page treated as a counterintelligence concern. Not long afterward, FBI Director Comey and his deputy, McCabe, met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch to discuss the news of Page joining the Trump campaign and “efforts to compromise” him by the Russians, according to a recently declassified memo.
Then, sometime in the “late spring” of 2016, Comey held an unusual briefing concerning Page and the alleged national security risk he posed, with the Obama administration’s highest-ranking national-security officials, who, in addition to Lynch, included National Security Adviser Susan Rice, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
By autumn, in the heat of the presidential election campaign, the FBI had Page under constant surveillance, vacuuming up all his text messages and emails and listening in on his phone calls, including communications with Trump officials.
As a top FBI counterintelligence official, Strzok supervised from Washington the earlier case involving the three undercover Russians in New York, and was familiar with Page’s help in the case, officials say. He did not target Page as a suspect until after Page joined the Trump campaign. Text messages obtained by the Justice Department inspector general reveal that Strzok was stridently opposed to Trump’s bid for president.
https://www.realclearinvestigations...._as_idiot.html
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