“Large parts of the publicly-released version of the application are blacked out. (Trump is said to be considering releasing some of the currently redacted sections.) There are sentences with a word blacked out. There are entire sentences blacked out. There are entire paragraphs and entire pages blacked out. All of that makes the application difficult to read and fully understand. Nevertheless, it is still possible to make out just how grossly wrong the FBI was.”
(Byron York – Washington Examiner) A huge controversy erupted last year when President Trump declassified parts of the FBI’s secret request to wiretap former Trump campaign volunteer foreign policy adviser Carter Page…..
Defenders and critics of the president argued over whether the October 2016 warrant application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court relied extensively on the so-called Steele dossier, which was a collection of anti-Trump allegations compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign. They also argued over whether the warrant adequately informed the court that the dossier was, in fact, a work of political opposition research, rather than legitimate intelligence gathering.
The arguments ended in impasse, with defenders and detractors set in their positions.
Now, however, we have new evidence, in the form of the Mueller report, to evaluate the Page FISA application. We can ask: Was the information the FBI relied on true? Were the FBI’s representations to the court accurate? The answers do not bode well for the bureau.