If the Trump-Russia investigation is truly a witch hunt, as Trump says, the FBI’s application for a FISA surveillance warrant would prove it. Why won’t his Administration allow Congress to see it? (THREAD)
2/ Among the key allegations made by Trump’s allies is that the infamous DNC-funded opposition research dossier provided the basis for the FISA warrant that reportedly allowed surveillance against former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page and potentially others.
3/ To obtain a FISA warrant on a U.S. person, investigators must submit evidence to a judge that demonstrates a reasonable basis to believe that the intended target of the surveillance is an “agent of a foreign power.”
4/ The FISA application would reveal exactly what evidence the FBI relied on to suspect that people within Trump’s orbit were in cahoots with Russia.
5/ If the dossier was the principal evidence presented in the FISA warrant application, it would vindicate Trump and his allies claims that the Russia investigation was just a political witch hunt.
6/ This is why the FISA warrant application is of such keen interest to Trump’s defenders.
7/ Last week, Rep. Jim Jordan, a Trump ally, grilled FBI Director Chris Wray about the dossier’s role in the FBI’s FISA warrant application, and demanded that he allow Congress access to it. Wray refused, saying it was classified.
8/ Yet, there’s one person who has the unchecked power to declassify anything he likes, including the FBI’s FISA warrant application — Wray’s boss, President Donald Trump. It’s baffling that he refuses to do so.
9/ Trump has also made much hay of the Obama Administration’s “unmasking” of Trump associates whose conversations were picked up in routine surveillance of Russian foreign intelligence targets.
10/ Yet, here again the Trump Administration has resisted Congressional requests for access to the details of which Obama officials requested the unmasking and their basis for doing so.
11/ By ordering that the FISA application that the unmasking details be made public, he could prove that the Russia investigation was really the political witch hunt he claims. So, why doesn’t he do it?
12/ If it’s just the dossier, that the FISA warrant is based on, there’s nothing classified about that. Which suggests that there is more to it.
13/ If it's really a political witch hunt, Trump could be vindicated tomorrow. Trump has the power to get to the truth of the matter, yet is actively resisting doing so.
14/ The only reasonable explanation for Trump’s resistance is that he knows that it would reveal that the FBI had really good reasons to suspect something shady was going on between Trump’s team and Russia.
15/ This would spoil Trump’s primary line of attack in his campaign to discredit Mueller’s investigation.
16/ As National Reviews’ Andrew McCarthy wrote, “In the unmasking controversy, it seems Trump was more interested in politically exploiting the specter of abusive unmasking than in ordering the disclosure of what actually happened. Is the same thing true of the dossier?”
17/ No one knows the real reason Trump’s administration is stonewalling. If he wanted to release the FISA warrant application, he could.
18/ As McCarthy writes, “If [Trump] persists in that posture, we have to assume he would prefer that we not know what the FBI told the FISA Court.”
19/ BOTTOM LINE: If you believe that the Russia investigation is a political witch hunt, you also have to believe that Trump is sitting on the information that could exonerate him. I don’t buy that. Do you?
20/ I highly recommend the @AndrewCMcCarthy piece on the FISA warrant controversy, which was among my sources for this thread. nationalreview.com/article/454493…
