BREAKING: Justice Dept audit finds WIDESPREAD flaws in FBI surveillance of American citizens

by The Right Scoop

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found major problems with the FBI’s surveillance of Carter Page in December of last year and promised he would do an audit of other FISA applications for surveillance on American citizens. That audit is now done and, as you might have expected, he’s found widespread problems:

POLITICO – A Justice Department audit of the FBI’s use of secret surveillance warrants has found widespread problems with the law enforcement agency’s process for ensuring that all claims it makes to judges to get the warrants are backed up by facts.

In a bid to assess whether the faults in the Page’s surveillance process were an aberration or a chronic problem, Horowitz’s audit team zeroed in on 29 applications for surveillance on U.S. citizens or green-card holders over a five year period and whether the so-called “Woods procedures” for justifying an application were properly followed.

“We do not have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods Procedures in compliance with FBI policy, or that the process is working as it was intended to help achieve the ‘scrupulously accurate’ standard for FISA applications,” Horowitz wrote in a “management advisory” addressed to FBI Director Chris Wray.

These 29 applications reviewed are just a sample chosen by the IG from a total of 700 applications from between 2014 and 2019.

There’s not much detail yet on what was wrong with the 29 applications. But from what I’ve seen reported elsewhere, at least four of the applications had no corresponding facts at all:

I grabbed this directly from the report which relates to what’s above:

Our lack of confidence that the Woods Procedures are working as intended stems primarily from the fact that: (1) we could not review original Woods Files for 4 of the 29 selected FISA applications because the FBI has not been able to locate them and, in 3 of these instances, did not know if they ever existed;

(2) our testing of FISA applications to the associated Woods Files identified apparent errors or inadequately supported facts in all of the 25 applications we reviewed, and interviews to date with available agents or supervisors in field offices generally have confirmed the issues we identified;

Yeesh, this sounds bad. Just imagine what a comprehensive review of all 700 applications would find…

Below is the full IG report from the Justice Department if you want to read it:

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