The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) held no hearings about the application requesting to spy on Carter Page, a U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign volunteer, according to court documents filed by the Justice Department relating to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The lawsuit, filed by government transparency watchdog Judicial Watch, requested documents related to hearings held by the FISC regarding an FBI application for a warrant to surveil Page. When the Department of Justice (DOJ) responded that no records exist that are responsive to the request, Judicial Watch took the matter to court.
“In light of recent public disclosures about Carter Page, NSD [National Security Division] confirms that it has conducted a reasonable search and that no such hearings were held with respect to the acknowledged FISA applications,” Readler added.
Secret court judges aren’t required to hold hearings on FISC applications, but the lack of a hearing is likely to be questioned by supporters of President Donald Trump, since the request to spy on Page was filed in October 2016, shortly before the presidential election.
The timing of the warrant and the lack of a hearing are just the latest in a string of troubling revelations about the surveillance operation. Senior FBI and DOJ officials also failed to tell the court that the core of the evidence in the application is based on a dossier of unverified claims funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The officials also failed to disclose that the dossier’s author, former UK spy Christopher Steele, had an intense bias against Trump, according to senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr, who told the FBI that Steele “was passionate about him not being president.”
A copy of Steele’s dossier made it into the FBI’s possession through Ohr, who received it from his wife, Nellie Ohr, who herself was being paid by the same firm that commissioned Steele.
“The Dossier is Fake, nothing in it has been verified. It then filters into our American court system in order to spy on Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s political opponent, Donald Trump, and now we find out that there wasn’t even a hearing—that Donald Trump’s 4th Amendment right to privacy was signed away... and someone in there is swearing that this stuff is true, when it wasn’t? This is the scandal here—a police state,” Bongino said.
The FBI applied for and was granted an initial warrant and three renewal warrants to spy on Page, stretching over the course of a year. The DOJ response suggests that no hearings were held in all four instances.
FISA, which allows for some of the most intrusive surveillance under U.S. law, is meant to target agents of foreign powers. Page was labeled as an agent of Russia in the applications, with Steele’s unverified dossier making up the core of the probable cause. The officials involved in signing the applications have been referred for criminal investigation for allegedly depriving Page of his rights.
Despite a year of intense surveillance and claims that he is a Russian agent, Page was never charged with a crime.
The following month, October 2016, the FBI and DOJ used the Yahoo News article as evidence in the FISA application, without mentioning that Steele was also the source of that story.
