The following article appeared in
Powerline on February 5th
By Scott
Johnson
Our former FBI agent reader writes to
take issue with Byron
York’s assertion that the FBI
wiretapped Carter Page in 2013. He says it’s much worse than that and that
this is almost certainly what happened:
Back in 2013 the FBI was listening to
its standard, ongoing, FISA coverage of all things Russian. They were NOT
investigating or wiretapping Page. The FBI was investigating and wiretapping
Russians. It had no idea who Page was. By listening to Russians, however, the
FBI discovered that Page was in touch with Russians.
What they would have done next is
standard operation procedure in the counterintelligence world: they did some
background on Page, contacted him, and got him to cooperate against those
Russians. Anyone who read the court filing in the resulting case–including the
Russians–would have had no trouble figuring out that Page had been cooperating
with the FBI.
![]() |
An obvious 007 type if I ever saw one! |
The likelihood that the Russians
almost certainly knew all this–and we know they characterized Page as an
“idiot”–makes the notion that all of a sudden in 2016 they were using Page as
some sort of master spy even more absurd than it already was on its face.
Bear in mind, the FBI can’t get a
FISA warrant on a US Person just for talking to Russians. They have to show
probable cause that the US Person is engaged in “clandestine intelligence
activity” (i.e., real “spy stuff”) on behalf of the Russians. That’s not
something that can ordinarily be established by a phone conversation or two
since, by the very nature of the thing, “clandestine intelligence activity” is
kept … clandestine.
Color me skeptical in the extreme
that anything of the sort was presented to the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court. So I’d say there’s probable cause to believe that we
haven’t heard the last of this, and it’s not going to get better.
Here’s a link to the Wall Street
Journal article that includes a link to the complaint in the case against the
Russians, the case in which Carter Page was caught up: “Former
Trump Aide Carter Page Was on U.S. Counterintelligence Radar Before Russia
Dossier.” I’m not the only one thinking along these lines. Bill
Jacobson is spot on at Legal Insurrection:
Carter Page Was The
Excuse, Not The Reason.
That a FISA warrant was
issued as to Carter Page was reported last spring. So that wasn’t a surprise,
but the surprise is that anyone actually cared about Carter Page. Have you seen
the guy on TV? He’s on TV almost as much as Adam Schiff, and they both come
across as doofuses. Carter Page was so important the FBI went out on a limb to
use a questionable document in court to convince a judge to surveil him? I’m
not buying it.
That Carter Page was
not the real subject of the surveillance was revealed by the hyperventilated
attempts to keep the memo from being released based on claims it would reveal
critical sources and methods and damage national security. Now that we’ve seen
the memo, we know that those protestations were false.
The surveillance of
Carter Page was not about Carter Page. He’s a bit player in a larger drama, and
that larger drama is what we need to understand….
Naturally I
have a theory to explain this.
Carter Page is featured in the
complaint paragraphs 32-24, at pages 12-13 (embedded below via Scribd). It
explains exactly how the FBI learned about Carter Page. The Russians would need
to be brain dead not to realize this is Page. Further, email is not exactly a
“clandestine intelligence” technique. Providing one’s personal, non-expert,
opinions regarding “the current and future of the energy industry” to a
Russian–any Russian–doesn’t make you an agent of the Russian government. And
willingness to discuss all this with the FBI is proof to the contrary.
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