Not just Carter Page: DOJ watchdog finds flaws in dozens of FISA applications

[Geee]

Washington Examiner

The Justice Department's independent watchdog found the FBI's disregard for its own Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act procedures extended beyond its controversial targeting of former Trump campaign associate Carter Page. 

 

An audit, the findings of which were released on Tuesday, uncovered a lack of properly documented verifications in dozens of electronic surveillance applications. 

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report focused narrowly on the bureau’s requirement to create and maintain an accuracy subfile known as a “Woods file” to ensure that factual assertions in FISA applications are backed up by demonstrable evidence. FBI policy requires that the Woods file to contain supporting documentation for every factual assertion in a FISA application. 

“We believe that the repeated weaknesses in the FBI’s execution of the Woods Procedures in each of the 29 FISA applications we reviewed to date — including the four applications for which the FBI could not furnish an original Woods File — raise significant questions about the extent to which the FBI is complying with its own requirement that FISA applications be supported by documentation in the Woods File,” Horowitz concluded. “We believe that a deficiency in the FBI’s efforts to support the factual statements in FISA applications through its Woods Procedures undermines the FBI’s ability to achieve its ‘scrupulously accurate’ standard for FISA applications.”