Judicial Watch: Justice Department Discloses No FISA Court Hearings Held on Carter Page Warrants

‘[N]o such hearings were held with respect to the acknowledged FISA applications. Accordingly, no responsive hearing transcripts exist.’

 

Judicial Watch

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today announced that in response to a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the Justice Department (DOJ) admitted in a court filing last night that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held no hearings on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) spy warrant applications targeting Carter Page, a former Trump campaign part-time advisor who was the subject of four controversial FISA warrants.

In the filing the Justice Department finally revealed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held no hearings on the Page FISA spy warrants, first issued in 2016 and subsequently renewed three times:

[National Security Division] FOIA consulted [Office of Intelligence] … to identify and locate records responsive to [Judicial Watch’s] FOIA request…. [Office of Intelligence] determined … that there were no records, electronic or paper, responsive to [Judicial Watch’s] FOIA request with regard to Carter Page. [Office of Intelligence] further confirmed that the [Foreign Surveillance Court] considered the Page warrant applications based upon written submissions and did not hold any hearings.

The Department of Justice previously released to Judicial Watch the heavily redacted Page warrant applications. The initial Page FISA warrant was granted just weeks before the 2016 election.

The DOJ filing is in response to a Judicial Watch lawsuit for the FISA transcripts (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-01050)).

In February, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a memo criticizing the FISA targeting of Carter Page. The memo details how the “minimally corroborated” Clinton-DNC dossier was an essential part of the FBI and DOJ’s applications for surveillance warrants to spy on Page.

Judicial Watch recently filed a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court seeking the transcripts of all hearings related to the surveillance of Carter Page.

“It is disturbing that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance courts rubber-stamped the Carter Page spy warrants and held not one hearing on these extraordinary requests to spy on the Trump team,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Perhaps the court can now hold hearings on how justice was corrupted by material omissions that Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the DNC, a conflicted Bruce Ohr, a compromised Christopher Steele, and anti-Trumper Peter Strzok were all behind the ‘intelligence’ used to persuade the courts to approve the FISA warrants that targeted the Trump team.”

Ohr speaks! (Behind closed doors)

American Thinker

By Thomas Lifson

You can almost smell the fear in the Get Trump camp that Bruce Ohr might be the thread that could be pulled to unravel the conspiracy of high-ranking officials to spy on the Trump campaign and then, after the election, put into action the “insurance policy” Peter Strzok mentioned to his mistress (and co-worker) Lisa Page in an August 2016 text message, to remove a duly elected president from office.

The New York Times, which serves as a pilot fish for the rest of the media, has been working hard to minimize the damage he might do.  On August 17, as Ohr’s name was being introduced to inhabitants of the MSM bubble thanks to a threat by President Trump to remove his security clearance, the Times outright lied about his position in the Department of Justice, calling him a “midlevel” official in the DOJ.  This lie was picked up and repeated in many other articles and was used on cable news reports extensively, thereby falsely branding him as a minor player caught up and persecuted by Trump and anyone else paying attention.

Ohr was, prior to his demotion, the top-ranked career official (i.e., not a political appointee) in the Justice Department.  While the Times has not (so far as I have been able to discover) issued an official correction for this lie, the day before yesterday, it called him a “senior career Justice Department official” and yesterday, in its report on the hearing (didn’t  the Times cover this itself?), ran an Associated Press report that called him “a high-ranking official in the deputy attorney general’s office” but identified his significance in the lede as “[a] longtime government lawyer who has become a central figure in President Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the Russia investigation.”  Other media went along with this Ohr-as-victim party line; CNN, for instance, called him the “Justice Department official in Trump’s crosshairs.”

One side benefit of Ohr’s appearance is that we now finally have more than one picture of Ohr.  Up until yesterday, the sole picture of the former number-four official in the Obama Justice Department was from the ceremony accompanying  an award he had received years ago.  Here is a new head shot taken from Fox News video of his arrival:

Yes, Virginia, there is a deep state. And it’s at State

Image via kwese.com

 

Flopping Aces

By DrJohn

Over the last 18 months, democrats have been fond of saying that the walls are closing in on Donald Trump. So much so, that David Rutz of the Washington Free Beacon put together a hilarious montage of it:

Well, the walls are closing in. On Bruce Ohr and the deep state. The conspiracy is being ripped from the clutches of the FBI and the DOJ and pushed into the light of day. Yesterday Devin Nunes has some very interesting things to say. He asserted that exculpatory evidence was left out of the FISA app on Carter Page:

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes claimed Monday that the FBI and Justice Department failed to include exculpatory evidence in surveillance warrant applications against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

“There is exculpatory evidence that we have seen, of classified documents that need to be declassified,” Nunes said in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

“Exculpatory in nature in what way? Exculpatory in what way?” Hannity asked.

“In that the Carter Page FISA when the judges should have been presented with this exculpatory evidence that the FBI and DOJ had,” Nunes replied.

Then he went on to leave a teaser: