The nation is close to marking the tenth anniversary of the discredited Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which saw the FBI and Justice Department seeking a FISA intercept against Carter Page by relying on false news stories and a partisan oppo research dossier. These days, nobody defends the Carter Page warrant process, but ten years later we still haven’t figured out how bad the abuse was. In fact, just last week we learned that Carter Page was not the only U.S. political figure subjected to a dubious FISA surveillance.
The disclosure was made by Senator Grassley, who offered evidence of improprieties in a FISA surveillance order against Walid Phares, a prominent conservative Mideast expert who advised both the Romney and Trump campaigns. By 2018, the Crossfire Hurricane work had been taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller. At the time, the FBI had already obtained three FISA orders (an original and two renewals) for surveillance of Phares. Doubts about the process were raised by an FBI agent who was testifying in the investigation of another agent for misconduct. The agent testified that the three earlier surveillance orders had done little to bolster the case against Phares; if anything, the facts collected by the FBI undercut the original application for FISA surveillance:
Per reporting from another agency and what we learned from the investigation up to the point of the third renewal, there were no corroborating facts that tied {Phares] to certain facts that we thought were originally true. For instance, there was nothing confirming [Phares] received a large money payment, and nothing confirming [Phares] had a meeting in another country for the purposes of the initial allegation. I pointed out these specific corrections to the application in numerous instances throughout the FISA certified copy process. This was circa 2018. I sent these edits to Kevin Clinesmith who said, “We can’t send this to DOJ.” Kevin set up a meeting with DOJ and led a discussion on the FISA renewal. I provided arguments for how the information had changed our understanding of our initial analysis. In response they said, “We don’t know for sure” and that the statements they used in the FISA to describe the Target was “broad enough” to cover the differing perspectives.”