IG Horowitz report March 30, 2020, FBI FISA applications: “fundamental and serious errors in the agents’ conduct”, Crossfire Hurricane investigation
And I’ve now found a witness who says the original 302 did in fact say that Flynn was honest with the agents.”...Attorney Sidney Powell
“Instead of doing so, the government has continued to defy its
constitutional, ethical and legal obligations to this Court and to the defense, and to hide evidence that it knows exonerates Mr. Flynn. As is the essence of the problem here, instead of protecting its citizens, the “government” is protecting its own criminal conduct and operatives.”…Attorney Sidney Powell October 23, 2019
“The FBI clearly has records pertaining to Seth Rich, and it has withheld those
records in bad faith.”…Attorney Ty Clevenger October 11, 2019
From Inspector General Michael Horowitz March 30, 2020.
“As you are aware, in December 2019 my office issued a report examining
four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications—an initial
application and three renewal applications—targeting a U.S. Person and other
aspects of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) “Crossfire Hurricane”
investigation (“December 2019 FISA Report”).1 As detailed in our report,
among other things, we identified fundamental and serious errors in the
agents’ conduct of the FBI’s factual accuracy review procedures (“Woods
Procedures”) with regard to all four FISA applications. We found, for example,
numerous instances where the Woods File did not include supporting
documentation for factual assertions contained in the FISA applications, as
required by FBI policy. Additionally, we determined that the Woods File did not
contain, as also required by FBI policy, documentation from the Confidential
Human Source’s (CHS) handling agent stating that the handling agent had
reviewed the facts presented in the FISA application regarding the CHS’s
reliability and background, and that the facts presented were accurate. We
further found that the FBI had failed to follow its policies for re-verifying factual assertions made in the initial FISA application that were also included in the
three FISA renewal applications.
As a result of these findings, in December 2019, my office initiated an
audit to examine more broadly the FBI’s execution of, and compliance with, its
Woods Procedures relating to U.S. Persons covering the period from October 2014
to September 2019. As an initial step in our audit, over the past 2 months, we
visited 8 FBI field offices of varying sizes and reviewed a judgmentally selected
sample of 29 applications relating to U.S. Persons and involving both
counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations. This sample was
selected from a dataset provided by the FBI that contained more than
700 applications relating to U.S. Persons submitted by those 8 field offices over
a 5-year period. The proportion of counterintelligence and counterterrorism
applications within our sample roughly models the ratio of the case types
within that total of FBI FISA applications. Our initial review of these
applications has consisted solely of determining whether the contents of the
FBI’s Woods File supported statements of fact in the associated FISA
application; our review did not seek to determine whether support existed
elsewhere for the factual assertion in the FISA application (such as in the case
file), or if relevant information had been omitted from the application. For all of
the FISA applications that we have reviewed to date, the period of courtauthorized surveillance had been completed and no such surveillance was
active at the time of our review.”
“As a result of our audit work to date and as described below, we do not
have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods Procedures in compliance
with FBI policy. Specifically, the Woods Procedures mandate compiling
supporting documentation for each fact in the FISA application. Adherence to
the Woods Procedures should result in such documentation as a means toward
achievement of the FBI’s policy that FISA applications be “scrupulously
accurate.” 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;
(3) existing FBI and NSD oversight mechanisms have also identified deficiencies
in documentary support and application accuracy that are similar to those that
we have observed to date; and (4) FBI and NSD officials we interviewed
indicated to us that there were no efforts by the FBI to use existing FBI and
NSD oversight mechanisms to perform comprehensive, strategic assessments
of the efficacy of the Woods Procedures or FISA accuracy, to include identifying
the need for enhancements to training and improvements in the process, or
increased accountability measures.”
Read more:
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2020/a20047.pdf
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