More on the FISA warrant's from James Hohmann in today's Washington Post with a great quote from Senator Rubio,
In fact, the release of the FISA warrants further undermines the credibility of the partisan memo that Trump declassified in February from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). Contrary to its central claims, the warrants show that the judges were told that the source of the so-called dossier had political motivations. While most of the warrants are still redacted, it’s also clear that the FBI was basing its request on more than just what former British spy Christopher Steele told them.
“The Nunes memo accused the FBI of dishonesty in failing to disclose information about Steele, but in fact the Nunes memo itself was dishonest in failing to disclose what the FBI disclosed,” writes David Kris, a former assistant attorney general for national security, on Lawfare. “Now we can see that the footnote disclosing Steele’s possible bias takes up more than a full page in the applications, so there is literally no way the FISA Court could have missed it.”
The warrant also shows that the government told the judges after Steele went to the press with the dossier when FBI Director James Comey sent his October 2016 letter to Congress disclosing the discovery of the Anthony Weiner laptop in the Hillary Clinton investigation. “According to the FISA applications, Steele complained that Comey’s action could influence the election,” Kris notes. “But when Steele went to the press, it caused FBI to close him out as an informant—facts which are disclosed and cross-referenced in the footnote in bold text.”
Moreover, Page was no longer associated with the Trump campaign by the time the FISA warrant was approved – so this cannot really be considered surveillance on the Trump campaign. And Obama was not involved in authorizing the surveillance.
The Nunes memo also falsely claimed that a Yahoo News article was used to corroborate the dossier, even though Steele had been the source. In fact, the article was cited in a section on “Page’s Denial of Cooperation with the Russian Government.” It was used to lay out an argument against the warrant.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, said the newly disclosed materials show that the FBI followed the law and had “a lot of reasons unrelated to the dossier” for why it wanted to monitor Page.
“I have a different view on this issue than the president and the White House,” Rubio said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “They did not spy on the campaign from anything that I have seen. You have an individual here who has openly bragged about his ties to Russia and Russians. … And the FBI’s job is to protect this country from threats … So they look at all this information. They say: We have a guy here who's always in Russia, brags about Russia, and we have reason to believe -- and they list those reasons – why this is someone we should be watching. And they followed the legal process by which to do so.”
