Latest in Carter Page
On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a declassified opinion by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) detailing limited circumstances under which the government may sequester information that was collected unlawfully.
The Department of Justice submitted an unusual court filing in litigation over the release of the Carter Page FISA, arguing that the president's statements on Twitter concerning the Page FISA should not be assumed to be accurate or based on the president's personal knowledge of the underlying issue. The document, which was filed on Nov. 30 and first flagged by USA Today reporter Brad Heath, is available here and below.
The president and his allies have a new line of attack against the Carter Page FISA application: the FISA Court did not hold a hearing to adjudicate the merits of the application. As one of the early peddlers of this line of argument put it on Twitter:
The release of the Carter Page FISA applications represents a monumental disclosure to the public—and underlines just how disingenuous House intelligence committee Chairman Devin Nunes has been.
Pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Justice Department has—in a highly unusual move—released a redacted copy of the FISA application seeking a warrant against former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. The application became the subject of political controversy when the Republican majority on the House intelligence committee, on the basis of little evidence, accused the FISA Court and Justice Department of enabling the surveillance of Page for political rather than national security reasons.
Today, Lawfare is launching a detailed, annotated set of links laying out the known facts about L’Affaire Russe. We will keep this resource page updated as new facts, stories, documents, and statements emerge. Here, however, we want to consider a higher-altitude, more speculative question: What does it all mean? What possible explanations might make sense of the bewildering facts that have been reported? Are we dealing with Fake News or a Manchurian President—or something in between?