Threat Management, Threat Intelligence

Grassley, Graham ask Justice, FBI for FISA docs in Russia probe

The Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday asked the Justice Department and the FBI to hand over any FISA-related material related to the investigation of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election – and the probe of potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, including Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) applications and responses.

In a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe, Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., citing FISC's 2016 annual report, as well as media reports, said there was “reason to believe” that FISC rejected some FISA applications, which were “then modified and resubmitted” and that there was “reason to believe that the FBI and Justice Department may have submitted some final, signed FISA applications in these matters that the FISC rejected outright.”

A case in point, the senators wrote, was a report in the Guardian claiming, “'[T]he FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance court (FISA) over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contact with Russian officials. The FISA court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus.”

Acknowledging that some of the documents requested “may be classified” or a mix of classified and unclassified information, Graham and Grassley requested that documents with classified information be sent to the Office of Senate Security while unclassified documents be delivered to the committee. 

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