FBI Lawyer Testimony Reveals FISA was approved outside regular procedures

[dukkha]

The Gateway Pundit revealed a bombshell from the transcripts of the testimony of former FBI Principal Deputy General Counsel, Trisha Anderson, from the transcripts released by Rep. Doug Collins.
Trisha Anderson is Harvard Law School grad. For three years, she was the Principal Deputy General Counsel for the FBI where she worked in the National Security Cyberlaw branch. FBI lawyer Lisa Page worked under Anderson, who worked in a supervisory role for the department. Anderson’s boss was none other than former FBI General Counsel James Baker. James Baker reported to the fired FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe and of course, McCabe reported to the fired FBI director, James Comey. Trisha Anderson is no longer working for the FBI. She is currently a partner at Covington & Burling law firm.
https://100percentfedup.com/bombshel...ar-procedures/

Anderson said all FISAs need to be signed off on in the FBI’s National Security Law Branch, where she was assigned at the time. Anderson said she was the Senior Executive Service approver for the “initiation” of the Page FISA, including determining whether there is legal sufficiency.

But Anderson stressed “in this particular case, I'm drawing a distinction because my boss and my boss’ boss had already reviewed and approved this application.” She emphasized “this one was handled a little bit differently in that sense, in that it received very high-level review and approvals — informal, oral approvals — before it ever came to me for signature.”

Anderson said that FISA approvals are typically “tracked in a linear fashion” and that someone in the Senior Executive Service “is the final approver on hard copy before a FISA goes to the director or deputy director for signature.” She said the Page FISA was approved outside regular procedures.

"Because there were very high-level discussions that occurred about the FISA," Anderson said she believed that meant “the FISA essentially had already been well-vetted all the way up through at least the Deputy Director [McCabe] level on our side and through the DAG [Yates] on the DOJ side.” Yates had already signed the application by the time it made it to Anderson’s desk.

The publicly available Page FISA documents show then-FBI Director James Comey also signed off on it.

Because the FISA application had already been approved at such high levels, Anderson said she did not look at the Page FISA application with much skepticism. “I wouldn't view it as my role to second-guess that substantive approval that had already been given by the Deputy Director [McCabe] and by the Deputy Attorney General [Yates] in this particular instance," she said.

Asked why this FISA application was different, Anderson said she believed “the sensitivity level of this particular FISA resulted in lots of very high-level attention both within the FBI and DOJ.”

“The General Counsel [Jim Baker] … personally reviewed and made edits to the FISA, for example,” Anderson said. “The Deputy Director was involved in reviewing the FISA line by line. The Deputy Attorney General over on the DOJ side of the street was similarly involved, as I understood, reviewing the FISA application line by line.”

Baker recently defended the FBI’s handling of the FISA process, saying “we took [the dossier] seriously” but “we didn’t necessarily take it literally” and did not treat it as “literally true in every respect.” Baker also said, “I am not going to go into details with respect to what investigative steps we actually took to try to validate it.” Former FBI Director James Comey still referred to the dossier as “salacious and unverified” even in 2017.

Anderson stressed that McCabe, Yates, and Baker all played key roles in reviewing the Page FISA. “My approval at that point was really purely administrative in nature. In other words, the substantive issues — the FISA had already substantively been approved by people much higher than me in the chain of command," Anderson said.

Anderson said it “typically would not have been the case” that people such as McCabe and Yates would sign off on a FISA application before she did.

"That part of it was unusual, and so I didn't consider my review at that point in the process to be substantive in nature," Anderson said. "In other words, there were smart lawyers, high-level people on both sides of the street who had reviewed and signed off on the application, the details of the application. And so I was simply signaling, yes, this package is ready to go forward."

Anderson said the seal of approval from such high-ranking FBI and DOJ officials meant that her signature on the FISA application was mostly perfunctory.

Anderson cast doubt on whether Comey would usually read a full FISA application, considering he could receive more than a dozen in a given day. “And so, yes, the director or deputy director, if he signs the FISA, you know, relies on others,” Anderson said.

Even in normal circumstances, Anderson said she likely would not read the full FISA application before signing off on it “unless there were an issue that was identified by the cover note," due to time constraints.

Anderson admitted she did not read the Page FISA the day that she signed off on it but noted she’d read it at some earlier point in time.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...ates-and-baker