Via WaPo:
Having reviewed hundreds and hundreds of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant applications as the final stop between the FBI and the desks of Attorneys General William French Smith and Edwin Meese III, I read the Nunes memo as revealing one major fact that stands out above all other revelations: The FISA warrant for surveillance on Carter Page (and the three subsequent renewals of the warrant) omitted a material fact. While the FBI admitted that the information came from a politically motivated source, the bureau did not disclose that the source had been financed by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. That is a damning omission.
My job reviewing those warrants existed because prior to the establishment of a National Security Division at the Justice Department, a special assistant to the attorney general with the appropriate clearances had the job of making sure the attorney general did not sign off on a warrant application that got bounced back from the FISA court. Such a rejection had never happened before I got there, didn’t happen while it was my job and has happened only a handful of times since. That record is in large part because of trust developed between the FISA courts and the FBI and Justice Department over decades, especially the respect accorded the counterintelligence professionals at the bureau. That trust has now been injured.
Upon publication of the Nunes memo, a retired federal judge emailed me: “There is not an officer of the court in the land who in the context of this particular application to the FISA court should not have identified the source of the information as having been the [Democratic National Committee] and the Clinton Campaign. If I had granted the application and then subsequently learned that the information was sourced to the DNC and the Campaign, I would have rescinded the authorization and issued a show-cause order to the Government to explain who and why this sourcing was not made known to the court. The fact (if it be that) that the Government told the court that it was a political source, but did not identify who, in this particular instance, is highly probative that the Government purposely misled the court.”