Declassified recorded talk with Carter Page shows denials concealed from FISA Court Print this article
Newly declassified records detail the FBI’s plans to surveil Carter Page and show that the Trump campaign associate’s secretly recorded denials of allegations made in British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier were not relayed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Stefan Halper, a Cambridge professor and confidential human source dubbed Source 2” in DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz’s FISA abuse report, worked as an FBI informant in 2016 and recorded discussions with at least three Trump 2016 campaign members: Page, campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, and Campaign co-Chairman Sam Clovis.
Danger Room, Inspector General I. Charles McCullough of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence denied the senators’ request. In addition to citing the aforementioned “privacy” issue, McCullough stated that “obtaining such an estimate [was] beyond the capacity of the agency,” and to do so “would likely impede the NSA’s mission.”
In an effort to make sense of the government’s bizarre reasoning, this AMERICAN FREE REPORTERr consulted Steven Aftergood, secrecy expert from the Federation of American Scientists.
“I thought this response transmitted by the inspector general was a joke,” said Aftergood. “But evidently it was meant seriously.”
Military intel says it monitored U.S. cell-phone movements without warrant
The Defense Intelligence Agency told congressional investigators that the agency has access to “commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones” from both the U.S. and abroad. It said it had queried its database to look at the location information of U.S.-based smartphones five times in the last 2½ years as part of authorized investigations.
Such data is typically drawn from smartphone apps such as weather, games and other apps that get user permission to access a phone’s GPS location. A robust commercial market exists for such data for advertising and other commercial purposes. The Wall Street Journal first revealed last year that numerous U.S. government agencies were also buying access to that data from commercial brokers without a warrant, raising questions about whether those agencies were adequately safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.
Source: AP Photo/Files
On Tuesday afternoon, on his last night in office, President Trump declassified a cache of documents related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
“At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” Trump said in a statement. “Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public.” You can read the document below.
“I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form,” Trump added. “I determined that the materials in that binder should be declassified to the maximum extent possible. In response, and as part of the iterative process of the declassification review, under a cover letter dated January
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Source: AP Photo/Files
Just hours before leaving the White House, President Donald Trump declassified documents related to Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI s investigation into Trump campaign officials during the 2016 election and well after the Trump administration took hold in January 2017. The announcement was made in a memo sent to the Attorney General, CIA director and Director of National Intelligence. At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public. I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form, Trump wrote. I determined that the materials in that binde