‘Lack of Candor’ Cited Before in Surveillance Requests by Obama Administration

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Heritage Foundation

A judge who is part of a secret court system criticized the Obama administration for “an institutional lack of candor” in seeking warrants to spy on U.S. citizens.
This scrutiny came in the form of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court report, issued last spring in an investigation that began well before most of the public ever heard of opposition research firm Fusion GPS, former British spy Christopher Steele, or Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.

“The common denominator is the agencies were not fully transparent to the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court]. The comparison ends at that point,” David Shedd, a former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Daily Signal.
“The only thing that would describe a pattern is the absence of candor with the court,” Shedd said.
In the case Shedd recalled, the National Security Agency from 2011 through 2016, a five-year period, conducted illegal surveillance on American citizens, according to a 99-page rebuke by the judge issued April 26, 2017—three months after Trump was sworn in as president.
Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a member of the FISA court, signed the reprimand. It said the court learned in October 2016 that analysts at the National Security Agency were conducting prohibited databases searches “with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the court.”
The FISA court’s report criticized the NSA’s Office of Inspector General and the NSA’s Office of Compliance for Operations with “an institutional lack of candor” and described the matter as raising “very serious Fourth Amendment issues.”