[Red State] The presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), Rosemary Collyer, was widely praised on Tuesday for her sharp rebuke of the FBI over their abuses of the FISA application process. DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’ report listed seven mistakes or omissions in the first application for a warrant to spy on Trump advisor Carter Page. By the time of the third renewal, there were 17.
Judge Collyer was angry. After all, this was such a shock. Here’s what she wrote:
The frequency with which representations made by F.B.I. personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other F.B.I. applications is reliable.
The court expects the government to provide complete and accurate information in every filing,
Judge Collyer has ordered the DOJ and the FBI to review each application they have submitted to the court and "to explain what steps have been taken to assure the candor of each submission." And she has set a deadline of January 10, 2020 for this report.
It’s great that she appears to be cracking down on these agencies in the wake of the IG’s revelations, but why did Judge Collyer fail to act when Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), then-Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote to her in 2018 to express his concern that the FBI had acted improperly?
The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel reported on Friday that Nunes sent a letter to Judge Collyer on February 7th, 2018 to tell her what his committee had found during their investigation of the FBI’s four applications. He wrote, "The Committee found that the FBI and DOJ failed to disclose the specific political actors paying for uncorroborated information that went to the court, misled the FISC regarding dissemination of this information, and failed to correct these errors in the subsequent renewals." Mr. Nunes "asked the court whether any transcripts of FISC hearings about this application existed, and if so, to provide them to the committee." Strassel wrote: 
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