Court orders FBI to fix national security wiretaps

WASHINGTON — A secretive federal court accused the FBI on Tuesday of misleading judges about the rationale for wiretapping a former Trump campaign adviser and ordered the bureau to propose changes in how investigators seek their permission for national security surveillance targeting Americans.

In an extraordinary public order, the presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Rosemary Collyer, gave the FBI a Jan. 10 deadline to come up with a proposal. It was the first public response from the court to the scathing findings released last week by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general about the wiretapping of a former Trump adviser, Carter Page, as part of the Russia investigation.

“The frequency with which representations made by FBI 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 FBI applications is reliable,” Collyer wrote.

The court “expects the government to provide complete and accurate information in filing,” she added, using italics to emphasize the court’s anger.

While the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, debunked the claims by President Donald Trump and his allies that senior FBI officials were part of a political conspiracy, his investigation also exposed a litany of errors and inaccuracies where case agents cherry-picked the evidence about Page as they sought permission to eavesdrop on his calls and emails.

The FBI issued a statement noting that its director, Christopher Wray, had called the conduct by certain employees described in the report “unacceptable and unrepresentative of the FBI as an institution” and ordered “more than 40 corrective steps” to address the problems found by the inspector general.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week about the report’s findings, the chairman of the panel, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., addressed the court that oversees wiretapping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, telling the judges that they needed to take steps to preserve political support for the national security surveillance system.

“The FISA system, to survive, has to be reformed,” Graham said.

Horowitz is scheduled to testify about the report again Wednesday at a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.