About That Carter Page FISA Warrant: NYT Asks Court to Unseal Surveillance Documents

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Jill Wine-Banks? @JillWineBanks
This is big development. Maybe like the start of the Pentagon Papers case but with court order rather via leak.... https://t.co/1yRVDdMhFE


The Times Asks Court to Unseal Documents on Surveillance of Carter Page

WASHINGTON — The New York Times is asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to unseal secret documents related to the wiretapping of Carter Page, the onetime Trump campaign adviser at the center of a disputed memo written by Republican staffers on the House Intelligence Committee.

The motion is unusual. No such wiretapping application materials apparently have become public since Congress first enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978. That law regulates electronic spying on domestic soil — the interception of phone calls and emails — undertaken in the name of monitoring suspected spies and terrorists, as opposed to wiretapping for investigating ordinary criminal suspects.

Normally, even the existence of such material is a closely guarded secret. While applications for criminal wiretaps often eventually become public, the government has refused to disclose the contents of applications for intelligence wiretaps — even to defendants who are later prosecuted on the basis of information derived from them...

“Given the overwhelming public interest in assessing the accuracy of the Nunes memorandum and knowing the actual basis for the Page surveillance orders,” the Times’s motion says, the court should direct the publication of its orders and the application materials "with only such limited redactions as may be essential to preserve information that remains properly classified notwithstanding the declassification and dissemination of the Nunes memorandum."

The Times sent the motion and related documents to the Justice Department on Monday to commence the action. It also submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Justice Department on Friday asking the executive branch to disclose, following a declassification review, the same materials about the wiretapping of Mr. Page, who had left the Trump campaign a month before the government applied to wiretap him.


read: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/us/politics/new-york-times-carter-page-documents-request-unseal.html?smid=fb-share

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