RUTHFULLY YOURS

What we have long suspected (see, e.g., here and here) has now been confirmed: The Obama Justice Department and the FBI used the unverified Steele dossier to convince a federal court to issue a warrant authorizing surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser. Confirmation came in the much-anticipated memorandum released today by the Republican-controlled House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The memo states that the Obama administration concealed from the court that the dossier was commissioned and paid for by the political campaign of Donald Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Nor was the court informed that the dossier’s author, former British spy Christopher Steele, told a senior Justice Department official that he was “desperate” to prevent Trump from being elected president.

Moreover, despite presenting dossier information as probable cause on four separate occasions — for the initial FISA warrant in October 2016, and three times in the ensuing months — the FBI failed to verify the dossier’s explosive allegations and failed to inform the court that its efforts to corroborate the allegations had been unavailing. Indeed, the memo relates that the government once presented a news story to the court as corroboration for Steele’s claims, apparently unaware that Steele himself was the source for the news story.

The dossier was a compilation of Steele’s reports, based on anonymous Russian sources. His informants provided information based on accounts that were multiple levels of hearsay removed from the events they purported to describe.

The FISA court warrant targeted Carter Page, who had volunteered to serve as a Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser. The memo relates that the warrant was originally issued on October 21, 2016, and re-authorized three times thereafter. Under FISA, warrants targeting American citizens lapse after 90 days. If you’re keeping score, that means a warrant based on claims that Trump was corruptly aligned with the Kremlin was renewed twice after Donald Trump became president.

The House Intelligence Committee memo on abuse of power by the Federal Bureau of Investigation appeared just after 12:00 p.m. Eastern time, and American political life never will be the same. The House Republicans make a persuasive if not prima facie case that senior FBI officials used a fake dossier paid for by the Democrats to get a court order for electronic surveillance of the Trump campaign. If the charge sticks, America will have a real-life instance of the sort of scenario found in pulp thrillers—a rogue intelligence agency operating in the darkness and abusing its power to manipulate elections.

Senior FBI and CIA officials (as well as a number of prominent Democrats) accused Trump of endangering national security by releasing the memo. This recalls the old Soviet-era joke about the Radio Yerevan listener who calls in to ask whether it’s a crime to call Brezhnev an idiot. The answer: “Yes, because it’s a state secret.”

This is political plutonium.

Here are the basic facts:

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the U.S. counterintelligence service cannot surveil American citizens without a court order. The FBI obtained such a warrant in October 2016 to eavesdrop on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.