Yesterday President Trump tweeted he will veto the House FISA re-authorization if it is passed without first investigating and exposing prior FISA abuses committed against his prior election campaign and administration:
The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote by proxy on the FISA re-authorization previously passed by the Senate. No-one has any idea if the FISA vote will actually pass the House and it appears most republicans are positioned to vote against it.
Lou Dobbs discusses the issues with Representative Jim Jordan shortly before President Trump tweeted his intent. WATCH:
These developments come on the heels of increased sunlight into the corrupt purposes and intents of Obama-era intelligence officials and how they weaponized their authorities to target the Trump administration starting with National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
[…] It was the FBI, not the NSA, that wiretapped Kislyak’s calls and created the summary and transcript, the former officials said. (link)
The FBI was conducting (FISA) surveillance on Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. When Kislyak contacted Flynn the call was intercepted by the FBI. The calls were then transcribed and “tech cuts” created.
On January 3rd Lisa Page and Peter Strzok were text messaging about the intercept. It is important to note these text messages have never been released; and were intentionally removed and hidden from the text messages that were released.
We only know about these specific texts from a Senate oversight committee paper that put a timeline together.
This January 3rd communication is critical so I’m going to explain it. You will see why the FBI and DOJ and Intelligence Community have kept it hidden:
A FISA order, in this case on Sergey Kislyak, is referred to as “technical coverage” or a “tech”. The FBI interceptors, staff doing the interception, then type up summaries of telephone conversations captured. Those are referred to as “tech cuts” or “cuts”.
The “CR cut” in the text message above is a “Crossfire Razor cut”, or a Flynn cut.
This is a summary of the call intercept. This is the non-traditional intelligence document that FBI Director James Comey gave to DNI James Clapper to use for the briefing of President Obama on January 4th. There are no redacted or masked names because it is a raw intelligence document.
The Clapper briefing officially informed the White House of the existence of an open FBI investigation into Michael Flynn. That briefing led to the January 5th “pull aside” meeting outlined in the Susan Rice memo.
The FBI was investigating Flynn and monitoring Russian communications to see a reaction to the sanctions imposed on December 29, 2016. When Kislyak called Flynn the FBI legally intercepted the call because the FISA authority was surveillance on Kislyak and Flynn was also under investigation.
But there are more implications…
The implication of the Lisa Page response about sharing the Flynn intercept, is the intention of the FBI to include the “CR cut”, the FBI summary intercept of the Kislyak call, within the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which was being released on Friday. The filter of their entire conversation was political.
We don’t know if the Kislyak-Flynn call was used as a part of the classified evidence within the ICA. It sounds from Lisa Page’s text response that the issue was discussed and then a decision made not to include it: “we were going to put that in”, implies they did not.
Bill Priestap and Peter Strzok have issues with the raw “tech cut” of the intercept being shared with DNI Clapper and White House. Lisa Page downplays those concerns by saying: ‘hey relax, in context we were about to put that readout in the ICA which is a far bigger deal than just sharing it with the White House.’
Putting it all together. The FBI intercepted the call. A “tech cut” summary of the call was generated exclusive to the FBI. James Comey gave that call summary including Flynn’s name to James Clapper; and James Clapper briefed President Obama.
Michael Flynn wasn’t unmasked in documents related to the call because Flynn’s name was never masked in the documents, the FBI “CR cut”. [READ SENATE DOCUMENT]