[Federalist] Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a damning report on Thursday chastising the Federal Bureau of Investigation for "widespread" violations in the intelligence agency’s applications for searches and surveillance filed through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court."The FBI’s Woods Procedures are designed to ensure FISA applications are ’scrupulously accurate’ and require agents to document support for all factual assertions contained in them. However, our audit found numerous instances where this did not occur," the Justice Department report states.
In the newly released audit, Horowitz detailed how "the FBI was not meeting the expectations of its own protocols" by failing to comply with the Woods Procedures. Of the 29 FISA applications from 2015-2019 that were reviewed, the inspector general and his team found more than 400 "instances of non-compliance with the Woods Procedures." When the timeline expands to encompass the approximately 7,000 FISA applications authorized between January 2015 and March 2020, Horowitz found "at least 179 instances in which the Woods File required by FBI policy was missing in whole or in part."
In February 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray expressed confidence in his agency’s FISA processes to legislators.
"It’s important for the American people to understand and for this committee to understand that the vast majority of the FISAs that we do, both the initial applications and the renewals, are the kinds of applications that I am quite confident, we don’t know each other, but I’m quite confident you wouldn’t lose any sleep over and we really wouldn’t want to grind things to a halt on that front," Wray told Republican Rep. Jim Jordan.