It took too long to confirm what we already knew about this fiasco. It's a classic tale of government overreach, one we're seeing more often with Joe Biden issuing vaccine mandate edicts and rebuilding the IRS to spy on our financial activities. No, this is something of a throwback. It deals with the Russian collusion hoax and the unlawful targeting of Carter Page, a former 2016 Trump campaign official. Page had worked with the CIA, State Department, and the FBI in years past. There was plenty of exculpatory evidence to prove he wasn't a Russian asset. Obama's Department of Justice intentionally omitted these key pieces of information when applying for a FISA spy warrant during the campaign.
Page has long since been exonerated of the ludicrous charge that he was a spy and part of this Trump-Russia collusion delusion that engulfed the political class and the DOJ for years. Very powerful anti-Trump forces worked and manufactured evidence to support this baseless claim. They always collapsed under scrutiny, but the damage was done. The FISA court ruled in June that the DOJ unlawfully spied on Page (via The Federalist):
A newly declassified ruling from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court in June demonstrates that the government lied about its legal basis for spying on former Trump campaign official Carter Page.
The ruling states that the information produced by the FBI’s unlawful investigation into Page was illegally obtained and that it “found violations of the government’s duty of candor in all four applications.” The ruling also orders the government that “it must temporarily retain, and potentially use and disclose, the information collected, largely in the context of ongoing or anticipated litigation.”
Under the court’s 21-page assessment, information obtained by all four of the warrants and applications is invalidated due to its illegal acquisition, unless the Department of Justice is using it “to investigate or prosecute potential crimes relating to the conduct of the Page or Crossfire Hurricane investigations” such as the FBI’s overreach and its violations of FISA.
[…]
This ruling…confirms what the FISA court and the Department of Justice both previously declared in January about the FBI’s investigation: that at least two of the four applications allowing “electronic surveillance and physical search targeting Page” by the FBI were “unlawfully authorized.”
The FBI has had a long streak of bad news days. They illegally spied on Page and the Trump campaign through Crossfire Hurricane. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was in the thick of it regarding the Clinton-funded Steele Dossier, which was the basis for the FISA warrants. Disgraced ex-FBI Director James Comey also knew the origins of this document and still went ahead with these games that have destroyed people's lives and reputations. They spied on innocent Americans based on Democrat-funded opposition research for the 2016 campaign. Some folks, like Nellie Ohr, wife of former top DOJ official Bruce Ohr, were contracted to dig up dirt which the FBI then used to secure these illegal warrants.
The FBI can't find the would-be bomber who placed pipe bombs at the headquarters of both the Republican and Democratic National Committees during the January 6 riot. They initially said that the 2017 shooting of the GOP congressional baseball team was not politically motivated, despite the shooter being a rabid progressive who hated Republicans. The shooter also had a kill list and waited for days near the area where the team would be practicing before he decided to attack. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) was seriously wounded in the attack. Yet, they were able to find a January 6 riot suspect who had a LEGO set of the US Capitol. Now, we're also learning that the FBI didn't do anything when multiple US gymnasts came forward with horrible stories of sexual abuse at the hands of now-convicted sexual predator Dr. Larry Nassar. The FBI's inaction led to more young women being brutalized by this man.
This agency, once considered the preeminent domestic law enforcement and intelligence institution in the country, has become a total joke.
