OPINION:
The new law that extended warrantless surveillance in some instances also contains language meant to ensure that the FBI never again targets a politician the way the bureau sabotaged candidate and later President Donald Trump.
The law places restrictions on how the FBI can persuade judges to give it wiretap authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — the law top bureau leaders abused to harass Mr. Trump and his aides.
From 2016 to 2018, the FBI went hog wild over a dossier financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign and written by its paid former British spy, Christopher Steele. His 35 pages of Kremlin gossip came primarily from Russian national and U.S. resident Igor Danchenko, who himself was suspected by the FBI in 2010 of being a Kremlin intelligence source.
The dossier, filled with fantastic claims of Trump-Russian election collusion, was not true. The FBI spent four years trying to confirm it, even offering Mr. Steele $1 million, but never did.
Lack of proof, however, did not stop the FBI. It submitted the dossier claims via four sworn affidavits to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges to win warrants to wiretap for one-year campaign volunteer Carter Page. The affidavits repeated the dossier claim of a Trump-Russia conspiracy, which didn’t exist.
The new law would have stopped the affidavit game by forcing the FBI to focus first on trying to confirm it. Since agents never did, you can assume the lack of evidence would have prevented anti-Trump moves.
For example, then-Director James Comey and then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe pressed the intelligence community to embrace the dossier in its public assessment of Russian election hacking — again, without any confirmation that its substantive claims of illegality were true. An inspector general report said the CIA considered the dossier “internet rumor” and refused.
As part of the Crossfire Hurricane inquiry to nail Mr. Trump, Mr. Comey took dossier tidbits to Trump Tower and the president-elect himself on Jan. 6, 2017. Mr. Trump was trying to get ready for the job of a lifetime but had to listen to Mr. Comey repeat unfounded Democratic Party smut. Mr. Comey did not tell his target that all the rumors came from the Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, Mr. Danchenko told FBI inquisitors that he had confirmed none of what he told Mr. Steele. What did the FBI do with Mr. Danchenko’s astounding admission? It ignored it and told judges he was leading agents down a path to dossier confirmation. This is not true. The court later said the FBI had misled judges.
And then the FBI did this: The Crossfire Hurricane unit hired Mr. Danchenko as a confidential human source, or CHS, and paid him over $200,000 to prove the dossier, which he didn’t. It ignored the fact he was once suspected of being a Kremlin intelligence source, according to a groundbreaking 2023 report by special counsel John Durham.
In 2010, the FBI planned to wiretap Mr. Danchenko but mistakenly concluded he had flown to Europe. He had never gotten on the flight.
The FBI’s team that validated sources raised alarm bells. Mr. Durham examined the case file dating back to 2010 and found it mentioned “Danchenko’s fairly extensive contacts with known and suspected Russian intelligence officers.”
The Durham report said: “Danchenko’s background and employment history had noted inconsistencies and omissions. … His immigration applications omitted certain derogatory information and contained inconsistencies and falsehoods. … It is extremely concerning that the FBI failed to deal with the prior unresolved counterespionage case on Danchenko. Given Danchenko’s known contacts with Russian intelligence officers and his documented prior pitch for classified information, the Crossfire Hurricane team’s failure to properly consider and address the espionage case prior to opening Danchenko as a CHS is difficult to explain.”
Maybe this explains it. On July 31, 2016, Mr. McCabe directed FBI agent Peter Strzok to open a Russian collusion case against Mr. Trump and his aides. Heading what became Crossfire Hurricane, Mr. Strzok replied eight days later to a text question from his girlfriend on whether Mr. Trump would become president.
“No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it,” Mr. Strzok said.
In the end, special counsel Robert Mueller concluded, “The investigation did not establish that [Carter] Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”
The new Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, signed into law by President Biden on April 20, contains language aimed at stopping another FBI love affair with partisan smut, at least when it comes to seeking wiretaps.
The law says that if the FBI is determined to use information produced by a political party or financed by it, as was the Steele dossier, agents must clearly identify the organization in their affidavit to judges. More importantly, the FBI must also corroborate the information and spell out the investigative techniques employed to do that.
With the Steele dossier, the FBI did not identify the Clinton campaign or the Democratic Party as paying Mr. Steele, nor did it confirm any of his allegations against Mr. Trump and his cadre.
If the new law were in place in 2016, honest agents would have never sought wiretaps until they truly confirmed the dossier. And since they never did, they never would have received judges’ permission.
In 2016-17, the FBI also cited a Sept. 23, 2016, news story to buttress the reliability of Mr. Steele, whom the FBI referred to as “Source 1.” The story, however, actually came from Mr. Steele himself.
Yet the FBI affidavit said, “The FBI does not believe that Source #1 directly provided this information to the press.”
Under the new law, if the FBI cites a news story, it must also name the author and, much more importantly, independently corroborate the information and explain how it did so.
The Russia hoax irony is that while the FBI, media and Democrats relentlessly went after Mr. Trump for supposed collusion, the people who actually colluded with Kremlin gossip and disinformation were the FBI, media and Democrats.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with the Washington Times.
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