[Washington Examiner] The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court indicated that it "suspects" there is a pattern of the FBI seeking out political information through surveillance orders, according to former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova.DiGenova, a lawyer whose work was caught up in the Ukraine-impeachment controversy, claimed this is the reason why presiding Judge James Boasberg ordered the Justice Department to provide the court with the names of targets for the applications audited by the agency's independent watchdog. That interim report, released by Inspector General Michael Horowitz last week, found widespread problems with the FBI's preparation of FISA warrant applications dating back to at least 2014.
"Do you know why the court did that? Because the court suspects that they're all political figures or people connected to political figures and that the FISAs were done for the purpose of targeting so that they could get political information, unmask the people, and then leak the information," DiGenova told WMAL’s Mornings on the Mall on Monday.
DiGenova offered no evidence to support the claim, but he echoed remarks by House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes. The California Republican recently told One America News Network that Horowitz's findings showed members of the FBI were already "experts" by the time they tried to dig up dirt on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page through FISA warrants to leak to the media right before Election Day.
Horowitz said his latest review focused on a "judgmentally selected sample of 29 applications" from eight FBI field offices out of 700 total filings that related to a roughly representative ratio of counterintelligence and counterterrorism targets.
In an order that followed, which makes no mention of a suspected pattern of politically motivated targeting, Boasberg demanded the government submit by June 15 a sworn declaration about the results of the analysis, including "the names of the targets," and assess to what extent the applications had material misstatements or omissions.