Carter Page FISA Documents Are Released by Justice Department

bubbabgone said:

"The documents made public on Saturday were heavily redacted in places, and some of the substance of the applications had already become public in February, via the Republican and Democratic Intelligence Committee memos."
​

They're not kidding. You could get through the first warrant in 5 minutes. Black is the de rigueur color.

"The fight over the surveillance of Mr. Page centered on the fact that the F.B.I., in making the case to judges that he might be a Russian agent, had used some claims drawn from a notorious Democratic-funded dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent."​

"some claims"? That, my friends is quite an understatment.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/us/politics/carter-page-fisa.html


Read it yourself. Like I said, the 1st one is a quick read. Apparently the subsequent warrants are built on the 1st and don't say much different. I'll get to them later.

A couple of things stood out.
1) Rather than claiming the FBI had verified the information in the warrant request, they pretty much said Steele (source #1) got it from his sub-sources (unnamed).
That apparently was good enough - we know where Steele got his sources but the warrant didn't say.
2) The warrant claimed ...
View attachment 67236695
We know who the business associates and the law firm are but the warrant request doesn't say.
David Corn said he spoke to Steele before the election. Which may or may not have been before the 1st warrant request. Corn is media. It depends on the October dates of each and it's not clear.
But we do know that Steele was shopping his dossier (in some form) around to get it promoted through circular reporting.

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Redress said:

https://www.debatepolitics.com/breaking-news-non-msm/325511-read-fbis-surveillance-warrants-carter-page.html

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bubbabgone said:

Quite right. My mistake. Didn't see it. Thanks.

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Linc said:

Gowdy read the FISA warrant and stands by it. nunes didn’t and stands with the Russians and trump.

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bubbabgone said:

That was bizarre. let's continue this on the other thread.

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• Request submitted to the FISC wherein the FBI presents its case that there is reasonable cause to surveil Carter Page. (If you don't click on the link, you won't understand my point.)

1. The FISC approves surveillance warrant applications based on whether the FBI, in its warrant application, presents a cogent case that there is a reasonable basis to believe, at the time of the warrant application, that the surveillance activities will produce material (not necessarily singularly probative, just material) evidence about whether one or more actors have participated in criminal behavior.
   • The surveillance may reveal the subject of the observation is party to criminal activity and/or motives, or
     The surveillance may reveal the subject of the observation is not party to criminal activity and/or motives.
   • Determining which is so is the point of surveilling the subject.

• Is the OP-er merely noting that the unredacted portions of the surveillance application reveals nothing that isn't already publicly available?
  • Well, yes, it's clear that the unredacted content pertains only to what has previously been made public. The application merely puts all of the bits pertinent to Page in one place.
  • It's pretty clear that the substance, means, sources and modes of additional information gathering -- be it to verify the Steele dossier and/or to obtain or verify other information -- the FBI undertook prior to submitting the application has been redacted. One need only look at the available section headings and what's been "blacked out" to tell as much.
• The documents about which the OP-er remarks is the applications for and grants of permission to use clandestine methods to surveil Carter Page, yet the OP-er comments focus on a completely different document, the Steele dossier, which happens to be but the publicly released portion of the evidence that supported the FBI's assertion that there was just/due cause to surveil Page as requested in the warrant application.
  • Is the OP-er of the mind that the Steele dossier is alone inadequate basis for the FISC judges to have approved the warrant application(s)?
    • Well, okay, but guess what, the FBI agrees with him. FBI leadership have repeatedly stated that the Steele dossier was not the sole basis for the FBI's seeking approval to clandestinely surveil Page.
    • Remember: the "burden of proof" for a surveillance request is much lower than that for prevailing at trial.
• Is the OP-er merely musing about a NY Times column? Maybe.
• Is the OP-er objecting to or applauding the FBI's soliciting approval to confirm the verity of their belief about nature and purpose of Page's behavior and remarks? Maybe.
• Is the OP-er's rhetorical purpose to inform or to persuade? I don't know; all the OP-er has done is note information that should be "common knowledge" to pretty much every adult American who's not been sequestered continuously in a cave for the past two years.

Xelor said:

...

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bubbabgone said:

"The documents made public on Saturday were heavily redacted in places, and some of the substance of the applications had already become public in February, via the Republican and Democratic Intelligence Committee memos."
​

They're not kidding. You could get through the first warrant in 5 minutes. Black is the de rigueur color.

"The fight over the surveillance of Mr. Page centered on the fact that the F.B.I., in making the case to judges that he might be a Russian agent, had used some claims drawn from a notorious Democratic-funded dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent."​

"some claims"? That, my friends is quite an understatment.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/us/politics/carter-page-fisa.html


Read it yourself. Like I said, the 1st one is a quick read. Apparently the subsequent warrants are built on the 1st and don't say much different. I'll get to them later.

A couple of things stood out.
1) Rather than claiming the FBI had verified the information in the warrant request, they pretty much said Steele (source #1) got it from his sub-sources (unnamed).
That apparently was good enough - we know where Steele got his sources but the warrant didn't say.
2) The warrant claimed ...
View attachment 67236695
We know who the business associates and the law firm are but the warrant request doesn't say.
David Corn said he spoke to Steele before the election. Which may or may not have been before the 1st warrant request. Corn is media. It depends on the October dates of each and it's not clear.
But we do know that Steele was shopping his dossier (in some form) around to get it promoted through circular reporting.

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bubbabgone said:

The OPer, (that would be me) simply reported the news of the release of the FISA warrants(s) requests which had been discussed but never themselves publicly released

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bubbabgone said:

Even though incredibly redacted, what you could see was that the FISA requests depended heavily, perhaps almost entirely on Steele's dossier. And there was nothing presented in the requests that indicated that the FBI had verified the information themselves beyond the equivalent of "Steele said so and we trust him", and "Steele said he didn't tell the media" ... which he did and was terminated as a source because of it.

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bubbabgone said:

1. Not everyone has agreed with the claim that the FISA warrants depended heavily on the dossier. Some refused to accept it. Do you?
2. Some claim McCabe said they wouldn't have gotten the warrant(s) without the dossier. Some refuse to accept that he said that. Do you?
3. The FISA requests show the overwhelming role the dossier and Steele played. Do you think it does?

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1. I don't know to what extent the warrant application depends on the Steele dossier. I don't for the reason stated in my paragraph just above.
2. That statement was purportedly something McCabe said in testimony to the Congress. I don't have a copy of McCabe's testimony wherein he made that statement. Do you?
   
   I'm aware that there was talk about releasing McCabe's testimony before a House subcommittee, presumably the one in which he said two things: (1) What the Nunes memo alleges McCabe said, "no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information," and (2) What another Congressman alleges McCabe said, that the "genesis of the investigation that did not involve the dossier." Sans a transcript of McCabe's testimony, there's no way to reconcile the two remarks.
3. It shows nothing of the sort. It shows only the role of the Steele dossier. Everything else on which the applications rely has been redacted, and there's more redacted content than there are citations of the Steele dossier or FBI-produced corroborations of Steele dossier content.

bubbabgone said:

So, yes, the OPer is "of the mind that the Steele dossier is alone inadequate basis for the FISC judges to have approved the warrant application(s)" if it alone is the sole support for its own claims.
Would they have gotten the warrant(s) without the dossier.
If you think so, why not disclose all the parties involved in the evidence presented in the warrant request?
...

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bubbabgone said:

I hate reading and writing long posts.
You shouldn't load up your comments with word-association storage dumps.
Makes it very tedious to reply to them and impossible to get past the DP word count limits.
That's why I couldn't quote much of anything you wrote.
So anyway ...

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bubbabgone said:

I hate reading and writing long posts.

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It's pretty clear that the substance, means, sources and modes of additional information gathering -- be it to verify the Steele dossier and/or to obtain or verify other information -- the FBI undertook prior to submitting the application has been redacted. One need only look at the available section headings and what's been "blacked out" to tell as much.

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• Well over half of what's in the application document is redacted; thus nobody can "see" that the requests "depended heavily, perhaps almost entirely on Steele's dossier." We have zero visibility to what else was presented to the FISC judges who approved the application(s).

• 
  [*=1]No. I'd have to reread the document again to be sure, but for now I'll simply assert that there's nothing among the document's unredacted content that indicates "the FBI had verified the information themselves."
  [*=1]Aside:
  • 
    [*=1]You quallfied your remark with "themselves," and that you did makes me think you don't fully comprehend how deductive reasoning works. Quite simply, it matters not who determines the verity of an assertion. What matters is the soundness of the analysis that "whoever" performed to determine an assertion's verity. For instance:
    • 
      [*=1]Do you (dis-)believe that a[SUP]2[/SUP] + b[SUP]2[/SUP] = c[SUP]2[/SUP] with regard to the length of the sides of right triangles because you haven't yourself verified the accuracy of that assertion?
      • 
        [*=1]If you accept that assertion as true, do you accept it only because other people have told you it's true? Or do you only accept it because you've proven its veracity yourself?
      
      [*=1]If I tell you that in a linear circuit with several sources, the current and voltage for any element in the circuit is the sum of the currents and voltages produced by each source acting independently, will you disbelieve me? Will you believe the assertion is true if I tell you it's true? What if someone else tells you it's true? Will you need to prove it yourself before you accept it as true? What will you conclude about the assertion's veracity if you obtain neither verification (proof) nor refutation of it?

Xelor said:

One of my questions is why?

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Dude, there is no dearth of reporting about the release.

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"Depended heavily" is a qualitative depiction of the extent to which the warrant application(s) relies on information in the Steele dossier. Neither you nor I nor anyone else who is not privy to the unredacted version of the application(s) can accurately attest qualitatively or quantitatively to the extent to which the application relies on Steele dossier content. We cannot because literally everything else on which the FBI relied has been redacted. What one can say is that the applications and related documents have been heavily redacted and that some content from the Steele dossier was relied upon to some extent. How great or small is "some?" We can't tell.

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Tan:
Maybe. Maybe not. Without being knowing what other information is in the application, there's no way to tell.

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Pink:
Why not? Because I don't have the authority to declassify the redacted information in the application. I'm a retired management consultant, not an FBI employee or member of Congress. I don't know what information has been redacted. That I don't know is why I refrain from concluding about the extent to which the Steele dossier was relied upon in the application for approval to clandestinely surveil Page.

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jmotivator said:

Michael Isakov has already stated that he got his information from Steele, and Isakov's article was used in the FISA application as corroborating information for Steele's accusations.

Note also that in that passage they make no mention of the origin of the dossier in question.

ALSO, by the time that that was written, Steele had already been on record in British court proceedings as leaking that information to Yahoo. Either the FBI investigation was lying to FISA or they were amazingly inept.

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Sam_Troy said:

Now that the FISA application has been been released we know the following: -The Russian collusion fairytale is a complete hoax -Hillary’s team paid for the hoax -The media was in on the hoax -Democrats are all-in on the police state

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Xelor said:

Red:
If one is of a mind to comprehensively express your thoughts, the character (not word) limit the DP implementation of vBulletin imposes does not make it impossible for you to do so. What stops one from doing so is a matter of will, not wherewithal. To wit:

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I think the first three words of the passage just above accurately depicts what you hate. I think the length of the post has nothing to do with it because my post to which you responded by truncating it to an ellipsis contains remarks that you wholly disregarded.

For example, you seem to have disregarded the following remark:

It seems you have because the post from which your quote above is taken irrationally, indeed contradictorily, declares without any qualitative or quantitative substantiation that the FISA application relied heavily on the Steele dossier. The substance of your "objection" to the FISA application is but an argument from ignorance. To wit, you wrote:

​

• Well over half of what's in the application document is redacted; thus nobody can "see" that the requests "depended heavily, perhaps almost entirely on Steele's dossier." We have zero visibility to what else was presented to the FISC judges who approved the application(s).

​

• 
  [*=1]No. I'd have to reread the document again to be sure, but for now I'll simply assert that there's nothing among the document's unredacted content that indicates "the FBI had verified the information themselves."
  [*=1]Aside:
  • 
    [*=1]You quallfied your remark with "themselves," and that you did makes me think you don't fully comprehend how deductive reasoning works. Quite simply, it matters not who determines the verity of an assertion. What matters is the soundness of the analysis that "whoever" performed to determine an assertion's verity. For instance:
    • 
      [*=1]Do you (dis-)believe that a[SUP]2[/SUP] + b[SUP]2[/SUP] = c[SUP]2[/SUP] with regard to the length of the sides of right triangles because you haven't yourself verified the accuracy of that assertion?
      • 
        [*=1]If you accept that assertion as true, do you accept it only because other people have told you it's true? Or do you only accept it because you've proven its veracity yourself?
      
      [*=1]If I tell you that in a linear circuit with several sources, the current and voltage for any element in the circuit is the sum of the currents and voltages produced by each source acting independently, will you disbelieve me? Will you believe the assertion is true if I tell you it's true? What if someone else tells you it's true? Will you need to prove it yourself before you accept it as true? What will you conclude about the assertion's veracity if you obtain neither verification (proof) nor refutation of it?

I don't know -- any more or less than does anyone else who's not privy to the unredacted document and the working papers FBI agents have amassed in building their case for there being probable cause to surveil Page -- what the FBI itself verified and didn't verify. Maybe you're correct; maybe you're not. To date, not enough information has been released to allow us to know.
​

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Atomic Kid said:

Now that it has been released we now know without a shadow of a doubt that Nunes's memo is the shameless total sycophantic sham we thought it was.

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bubbabgone said:

Why what? No kidding. All yesterday. So what.

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bubbabgone said:

Yup. Why only mention Source #1 if there were many other sources the FISC would need to know about?
What level of dependence on the dossier for a FISA application would be questionable to you?

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bubbabgone said:

Yup. Why only mention Source #1 if there were many other sources the FISC would need to know about?
What level of dependence on the dossier for a FISA application would be questionable to you?

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• One of the essential characteristics of political opposition research is that it depicts existential events and remarks. That trait is mandatory because opposition research that depicts non-existential events and remarks is useless for the purpose for which one performs (purchases) the research.
  
  In other words, if one is of a mind and willing to fabricate claims about one's political opponent, one doesn't need to do any research at all. One can conjure and utter pretty much anything without having to expend precious resources (time and money) on campaign staff and/or outside researchers for information about one's political opponent.

bubbabgone said:

One clue is the only person who they thought might need to be justified as a source.

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bubbabgone said:

So not mentioning the details of how the dossier came to be seems reasonable because you're only a humble retired management consultant with no opinion.

You musta been a helluva management consultant.

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bubbabgone said:

Your post plus my response was ridiculously over the word limit.
As you can see in #9, it wasn't my post that was the cause of surpassing the word limit.
You're still doing it.
Be more selective in describing the points you want to make.
Everything doesn't require a treatise.
Did you used to get paid by the word?

If you have an on-point comment, you should be able to make it without referring to some of your other glorious works on DP. Just a suggestion from a friend.

And deductive reasoning works most reliably when you expose yourself to both sides of an argument, the reasonableness of the arguments, and you know enough to judge the reliability of those who're making the arguments.

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Originally posted by bubbabgone How so?
The FISA warrants confirm what Nunes said.

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Second, for those who don’t remember, the controversy about these FISA applications first arose in February when House intelligence committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes released a memo claiming that the FBI misled the FISA Court about Christopher Steele, the former British secret agent who compiled the “dossier” on Trump-Russia ties and who was a source of information in the FISA applications on Page. The main complaint in the Nunes memo was that FBI whitewashed Steele—that the FISA applications did not “disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials.”

In response to the Nunes memo, the Democrats on the committee released their own memo. That memo quoted from parts of the FISA applications, including a footnote in which the FBI explained that Steele was hired to “conduct research regarding Candidate #1,” Donald Trump, and Trump’s “ties to Russia,” and that the man who hired him was “likely looking for information that could be used to discredit [Trump’s] campaign.”

based on this back and forth between the HPSCI partisans, I wrote on Lawfare at the time that the FBI’s disclosures on Steele “amply satisfie[d] the requirements” for FISA applications, and that the central irony of the Nunes memo was that it “tried to deceive the American people in precisely the same way that it falsely accused the FBI of deceiving the FISA Court.” 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. I said then, and I still believe, that the “Nunes memo was dishonest. And if it is allowed to stand, we risk significant collateral damage to essential elements of our democracy.”

Now we have some additional information in the form of the redacted FISA applications themselves, and the Nunes memo looks even worse. In my earlier post, I observed that the FBI’s disclosures about Steele were contained in a footnote, but argued that this did not detract from their sufficiency: “As someone who has read and approved many FISA applications and dealt extensively with the FISA Court, I will anticipate and reject a claim that the disclosure was somehow insufficient because it appeared in a footnote; in my experience, the court reads the footnotes.” 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 FBI gave the court enough information to evaluate Steele’s credibility.

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Sam_Troy said:

Now that the FISA application has been been released we know the following: -The Russian collusion fairytale is a complete hoax -Hillary’s team paid for the hoax -The media was in on the hoax -Democrats are all-in on the police state

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ClaraD said:

How did you come to that conclusion?

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Linc said:

Gowdy read the FISA warrant and stands by it. nunes didn’t and stands with the Russians and trump.

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