Good question

The presiding FISA judge, Rosemary Collyer, recently started putting a little belated pressure on the FBI to explain what it was up to in pursuing and renewing the Crossfire Hurricane surveillance.  She then abruptly announced that she was stepping down nine weeks early for "health reasons," but the questions she posed remain interesting, and I'm glad to see that IG Horowitz also is pursuing one aspect of particular interest to me.  Given the poisonous behavior of this particular hand-picked FISA team, what lies under the rock of the many FISA warrants pursued routinely every year?  As the New York Post editorial board puts it:
Were they playing fast and loose because they were investigating a presidential candidate and then the sitting president? Or was rule breaking so routine that they didn’t even think about it?
That's the real choice underlying the determination of "bias" or "no bias."


7 comments:

Grim said...

My money is on the latter. FISC has long been reputed to be a rubber-stamp organization. In part that is because they turn down almost none of the government's requests.

However, remember that FISC did turn down the original request from the FBI for this business. It was a rare exception in which they made the FBI go back and return with a more tightly-constructed ask. Thus, I conclude that probably we will discover that this fast-and-loose Crossfire Hurricane stuff is actually exceptional for being stronger than they normally bother with. The day to day stuff is probably even worse.

E Hines said...

It may be that the health concerns prompting Collyer's early withdrawal from the FISC are her political and judicial health.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/12/17/nuclear-devin-nunes-questions-fisc-judge-lack-of-candor-again-calls-for-dismantling-of-fisa-court/

never previously receiving such requests.

By Collyer's pseudo-logic, her own FISC was and has been illegitimate: there was a time before which no request for a FISC or FISC-like court, or even a FISA or FISA-like law had been received.

Eric Hines

Assistant Village Idiot said...

It's bad either way. We have been getting excited by the idea that the letter-agencies bent the rules into unrecognisable shape to take down this particular man. Yet what if this was all in a day's work, what they always do to the smaller fish, just ratcheted up for a bigger catch?

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Also: This would possibly explain why some of them are so dumbfounded that anyone is accusing them of doing anything wrong. When you bend rules long enough, you fully rationalise them - they become part of the culture and no one questions them. I have seen that at the hospital over the years, of policies that are impossible to obey, or actually bad patient care to obey, or people just don't want to work that hard to obey. Certainly, diagnosis to fit billing could be pointed to, or determination of disability in the face of a regulation under which no one would ever qualify because the law is stupidly worded and we have a good guess what they were probably trying to get at. The regulations on restraining and secluding patients are notoriously slippery, because it is notoriously hard to describe what you mean in a way that doesn't stomp over ten other patients' rights or render a unit unable to protect other patients by restraining anyone at all. If you do it to earn your daily bread, you quickly rationalise the fact that you are technically breaking the law (or at least regulation, which has the force of law).

How deep can that go? Soviet Union deep, given enough pressure and time.

E Hines said...

It's another reason to put civil servants on finite-time contracts that must be positively renewed--or not be renewable at all. Originally good people drifting astray.

Here's one explanation of how that happens: Tavris' and Aronson's Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), about cognitive dissonance and the steps we as individuals take to reduce it. I'm not sure how much stock to put in their work, but it exceeds a plausibility threshold.

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

I read somewhere last week a question: was Gordon Liddy's tactical mistake not to lie to get a warrant to search the DNC's offices?

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Update from today: https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/475463-jim-comeys-damaging-legacy-at-the-fbi-must-be-undone