A Second Opinion
I've written about FISA so much by now that I'm also sick of hearing about it. However, AmThinker has an article today by another former FBI agent who relates his experience with FISA: Two Possibilities in Trump Wiretapping, and Neither Is Good . The author's experience matches my own and I recommend the article highly. After presenting an overview of FISA--which rightly points out that any FISA on a US person is exceptional--the writer concludes:
Based on what we are told by the I.G., there are only two possible conclusions that can be reached regarding the official conduct of those responsible for infringing on Carter Pages Constitutional freedoms:
The first is that the hand selected team of investigators, attorneys, and Senior Executive Service officials with decades of law enforcement, administrative, and judicial experience were abject failures at a task that they were hired to perform. Speaking from personal experience, in FBI, DEA, and state and local wire tap investigations, the slightest omissions, misstatements, and clerical errors are routinely identified and corrected by the street agents and line prosecutors who do these investigations for a living. To believe that a "varsity level" team, with unlimited time, support, and resources, somehow inadvertently overlooked seventeen major omissions, misstatements, and/or outright falsehoods, is simply not believable.
The second possibility is that nearly everyone who significantly participated in obtaining FISA coverage on Page knowingly and deliberately operated outside the law to one degree or another. The reasons behind the decision to do so are irrelevant. The particulars regarding the seventeen I.G. findings are startling, taken individually. It's difficult to see how any of the individual omissions or misstatements could have happened accidentally. Viewed collectively, the apparent intentionality is nearly impossible to reconcile as anything but corruption.
Speaking for myself--and you'll see where I'm coming from if you read the article--I came to the second alternative almost immediately after beginning to learn just a small bit about the Carter Page situation. Nothing added up. The result was that, outrageous as it might seem, I had to conclude that intentional corruption was really the only possible explanation for what occurred.