Justice Dept.: Facts didn’t justify continued wiretap of Trump aide

WASHINGTON >> The Justice Department has conceded to a secretive intelligence court that the available evidence about Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser wiretapped by the FBI during the Russia investigation, was legally insufficient to justify the last several months of his continued surveillance in 2017.

The department has also promised to sequester phone calls and emails it intercepted while intruding on Page’s privacy, according to a newly disclosed order by the court that oversees national-security wiretaps under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

The wiretapping of Page as part of the Russia investigation has been a political flash point. Last month, a scathing report by the department’s inspector general found that FBI agents who assembled a description of the evidence that he might be a Russian agent had presented a misleading portrait of it for use in applications seeking the court’s permission to surveil him.

The FISA court approved an initial 90-day wiretap targeting Page in October 2016 and issued three renewal orders in 2017. But the department told the court that by those final two applications, “if not earlier, there was insufficient predication to establish probable cause to believe that Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power.”

The department informed the FISA court about its eventual loss of confidence in the available evidence about Page as part of a Dec. 9 letter to the court, following the release of the inspector general report.