Adam Schiff ‘took the bait’ with FISA memo, ex-House Intel investigator says

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House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff “took the bait” with the Democratic rebuttal to a Republican memo on alleged surveillance abuses by the Justice Department and FBI, according to a former investigator on the panel.

Kash Patel, an attorney who went on to take top national security roles in the Trump administration, told the Epoch Times in an interview last week about his strategy for writing the GOP memo, released in early 2018 over Democratic claims of politicization, that accused officials of misusing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on ex-Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page as part of the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s potential ties to Russia that started during the 2016 campaign.

“It was game on because we figured out under the rules of the House Intel Committee that there was a way to release classified information if it met certain requirements, and this material met those requirements while safeguarding sources and methods, which we were able to do,” Patel said in an episode of American Thought Leaders. “And so, while we were quietly running that process … on our side of the investigation, we wanted to make sure that memo was bulletproof. So all we put in the memo were excerpts from people’s under oath interviews and information that we gleaned from the FBI and DOJ’s own documents.”

He added: They were the “only things we put in the Nunes memo because we didn’t want it to be something that we put inflamed rhetoric behind. That’s why it reads kind of bland, but that’s how we set it up.” Patel was referring to Rep. Devin Nunes, who was chairman of the panel at the time. The California Republican is now the ranking member with Democrats in control of the House.

The Republicans released their four-page memo on Feb. 2, 2018, following a committee vote. It found that British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s anti-Trump dossier formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Page; former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe testified that no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA court without the Steele dossier information; the political origins of the Steele dossier were known to senior DOJ and FBI officials but excluded from the FISA applications; and DOJ official Bruce Ohr met with Steele beginning in the summer of 2016 and relayed to the DOJ information about Steele’s bias. Steele told Ohr that he was desperate that Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not becoming president.

The lead-up to that disclosure took some finesse, according to Patel, who said it was a carefully planned scheme to elicit a drawn-out response from the Democrats to their detriment. Patel said this plan, which he noted was information he has not told anyone before, was successful.

“We had this amazing team who had figured out all the legal gymnastics and ethical gymnastics to get us there,” Patel said. “I was just busy sort of writing it with my colleagues. What I said was, ‘OK, well, let’s also be a little strategic about this because if we write one, they’re going to want to write one.’ Which is OK because I said, ‘Let’s bait them into it. Let’s not tell them yet. We’ll put — we’ll follow the rules and inform them at a committee hearing.’ Which we did, and then we gave them the memo, and they were shocked that we had been working on this thing. In that same hearing or the one afterwards, our members rightly so said, ‘You guys write your own memo, and we’ll vote it out for you too.'”

Adam Schiff,Devin Nunes
Reps. Devin Nunes and Adam Schiff.

As Patel would tell it, Schiff “took the bait and put in so much more information in his memo than we did in ours because we knew we would be able to use that information later and prove how wrong they were. It would just take a little bit of time. So that was the strategy behind it.”

After a few weeks, on Feb. 24, the Democratic rebuttal memo, which was 10 pages, was released. Schiff, a Democrat from California, was ranking member at the time.

“FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign. In fact, DOJ and the FBI would have been remiss in their duty to protect the country had they not sought a FISA warrant and repeated renewals to conduct temporary surveillance of Carter Page, someone the FBI assessed to be an agent of the Russian government,” the Democrats contended. They also said the Justice Department “met the rigor, transparency, and evidentiary basis needed to meet FISA’s probable cause requirement.”

Patel explained why the sheer amount of information the Democrats released in their memo could be turned against them.

FORMER INTELLIGENCE CHIEF: ‘QUITE A FEW MORE’ UFOS DETECTED THAN PUBLIC KNOWS

“They would put all this information in there, like, ‘How dare you attack Bruce Ohr, you know, who is this DOJ official who had nothing to do with it.’ Well, actually, you’re wrong. His wife was paid $50,000. Bruce Ohr turned out to be the cutout for the FBI when they fired Christopher Steele. So that’s just one example of: We use the information that they put in their memo against them to show that what they were writing was actually incorrect, and we were able to prove it. And we were able to do that with also the origins of informing the FISA court what had and hadn’t been disclosed to them, and they were able to use a lot of information from there to say that the FISA court in fact had not been told of the relationship between Fusion [GPS], Steele, [and the Democratic National Committee],” he said.

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued a report in December 2019 largely vindicating the “Nunes memo,” criticizing the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA warrants against Page, for concealing potentially exculpatory information from the FISA court related to denials by a number of Trump associates, and for the bureau’s reliance on the discredited Steele dossier, which played a “central and essential” role in the FBI’s decision seeking electronic surveillance.

In seeking a typical search warrant, Patel said authorities need probable cause. But he explained that the FISA process is different.

Carter Page
Carter Page.

“When you go off a source: You have to disclose to the court its credibility and bias. And the one thing we found — one of those shocking statements that you’re just, like, you see it in the documents we finally pulled out of the FBI was: Christopher Steele had admitted to the FBI that he had, I forget the exact quote, but basically hated Donald Trump and wanted him not to be president,” Patel said. “That’s fine, you’re entitled to that, but if that’s your source, then you need to disclose that statement to the court to say, ‘We’re using this source. This is what he has to say about one of the bigger targets of our investigation.’ And then, you explain why you still think he’s credible anyway. They didn’t do any of that. They just withheld it. And then, way later, we would be proven right by the inspector general in his report.”

Horowitz said FBI interviews with Steele’s primary subsource “raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting.” The inspector general also said the main source’s account “contradicted the allegations of a well-developed conspiracy” in Steele’s dossier. Declassified footnotes now show the FBI was aware that Steele’s dossier might have been compromised by Russian disinformation.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Special counsel John Durham is investigating the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation.

FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who has since left the bureau, admitted to Durham in the summer that he falsified a document during the bureau’s efforts to renew its FISA authority to wiretap Page, editing a CIA email in 2017 to state that Page was “not a source.” Page has denied any wrongdoing and was never charged with a crime.

Patel said he did not think that the bureau attorney was a “lone wolf” wrongdoer. Clinesmith was sentenced to probation.

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