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Wednesday, August 01, 2018

Big Victory — Judicial Watch Forces Disclosure of FISA Warrants Targeting Trump Team

A year ago, on July 19, 2017, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Justice Department (DOJ) for copies of the applications it made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for warrants regarding alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.

As you might have expected, Justice didn’t comply — in fact, DOJ refused to confirm or deny any such documents even existed. But then, earlier this year, President Trump declassified the “Nunes Memo” which discussed the Carter Page Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants abuses. And Judicial Watch quickly sued as the FISA material could now be made public. In April the DOJ told the court that it would have something by July 20, last Friday. That day passed, but late the next day, late on Saturday, Justice released a heavily redacted 412-page document.

Despite the fact that most of the pages were blacked out, they seemed to confirm that the FBI and DOJ misled the courts in withholding the information that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC were behind the “intelligence” used to persuade the courts to approve the FISA warrants that targeted the Trump team.

The FISA court was never told that the key information justifying the warrant requests came from a “dossier” that was created by Fusion GPS, a paid agent of the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. The initial Carter Page warrant was granted just weeks before the 2016 election. Page is the former Trump campaign part-time advisor who was the subject of four controversial FISA warrants from the DOJ.

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