Benjamin Arie:
The drama unfolding between former FBI Director James Comey and President Donald Trump’s administration may have just taken an interesting turn.
Just weeks after Comey was fired by the president, declassified documents have now shown that Comey and the FBI may have repeatedly broken the law by improperly receiving and sharing intelligence from surveillance conducted on American citizens.
Even worse, there is evidence that Comey knew about these violations, but did little to stop them and hid the abuses from Congress.
According to Circa News, a property of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the powerful but secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court outlined its concerns about the FBI in a series of rulings. Those rulings have now been declassified, and reveal hundreds of privacy violations during Comey’s time at the bureau, according to Circa.
The court, which hears applications for warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, had information that could stun many Americans.
“The behavior the FBI admitted to a FISA judge just last month ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight the bureau promised was in place years ago,” Circa reported.
The court’s own documents back up this claim.
“The Court is nonetheless concerned about the FBI’s apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI is engaging in similar disclosures of raw … information that have not been reported,” stated a court ruling from April of this year.
In other words, the court responsible for overseeing the FBI’s spy activities suspected that even more abuses had been committed but covered up.
The bureau is normally not allowed to spy on Americans without a warrant, or send and receive unauthorized intelligence that it knows was conducted on citizens within the U.S.
