Now we learn from Tom Fitton's organization, the one I make a small contribution to, that the Carter Page FISA Warrant did not go through normal procedures ,as one would have thought.
More hypocritical arrogance.
The nation may never care that the Justice Department and FBI acted in a corrupt manner in order to spy on an opposition campaign. If that becomes the case then you can kiss this Republic good bye because adherence to the rule of law has become a meaningless matter. (See 1 below.)
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Our grandson, Henry, left the Bill Maher show after 3 years and landed another job working with Michael Mann. Mann had posted an opening and Henry applied and on the strength of his resume and an interview got the job.
Henry will be helping with:
FX To Turn Mark Bowden Tet Offensive Chronicle ‘Hue 1968’ Into Limited Series; Michael Mann & Michael De Luca Producing
Bowden’s historical books often have been optioned by Hollywood, and the best result came with the Ridley Scott-directed 2001 thriller Black Hawk Down. While that film told the story from the perspective of elite American soldiers who raided Somalia and then attempted to rescue downed pilots when things went awry, Hue 1968 will be a different exercise. Bowden wrote the book from multiple vantage points, and the series adaptation will humanize the conflict by telling the story through the eyes of different characters on both sides over a 26-day period. The cultural and historical capital city, Hue was the centerpiece of Hanoi’s 1968 Tet Offensive, a surprise attack by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong that sought to win the war in one stroke. Part military action and popular uprising, NVA infantry crossed mountains, undetected, with smuggled weapons awaiting them. This set the stage for a surprise attack that overran the city except for two small
military outposts.
The intertwined characters include a seemingly innocent schoolgirl on a bike, whose heart had hardened her into a revolutionary after her sister was executed, leading her to help smuggle weapons; a former NFL tackle who became a U.S. Marine colonel and tactician; a Buddhist poet-turned-Viet Cong commissar; an American civilian meeting his Vietnamese fiancée’s family; a math teacher from Hanoi in the North Vietnamese Army; a Marine captain radio operator from Pennsylvania, who immersed himself in local culture and language and then found himself unable to convince his supervisors that Hue had been overrun by conventional infantry; and President Lyndon Johnson in his pajamas in the White House with Gen. William Westmoreland, a sleepover guest who presented a rosy view of progress in Vietnam. The limited series will follow Bowden’s narrative structure to make understandable why bloody events unfolded the way they did and made clear that Vietnam was an unwinnable war for the U.S.
When Deadline revealed in April that Mann and De Luca had acquired the Bowden book on their own, Mann called it “a masterpiece of intensely dramatic nonfiction.” Bowden’s achievement is in making “them into us,” said Mann. “We are them. There are no background people; people abstracted into statistics, body counts. There is the sense that everybody is somebody, as each is in the actuality of their own lives. The brilliance of Bowden’s narrative, the achievement of interviewing hundreds of people on all sides and making their human stories his foundation, is why Hue 1968 rises to the emotional power and universality of For Whom the Bell Tolls and All Quiet on the Western Front.”
The producers chose FX largely because of an affinity toward network chief John Landgraf, whom Mann considers an auteur executive in the mold of Brandon Tartikoff when Mann made Miami Vice and Crime Story at NBC, and Mike Lombardo at HBO when Mann and David Milch teamed on Luck.
Johnny Pariseau will shepherd the mini for De Luca Productions with Justine Suzanne Jones at Mann’s Forward Pass.
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1) Judicial Watch: DoJ Says No FISA Court Hearings Held to Get Warrants Against Carter Page
Judicial Watch announced that documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the Obama Department of Justice did not request a formal FISA court hearing to obtain warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
While a court hearing is not necessary to obtain a FISA warrant, it's shocking that a request to spy on the campaign of the opposition party did not trigger extra caution that a court hearing would have demonstrated.
In the filing the Justice Department finally revealed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held no hearings on the Page FISA spy warrants, first issued in 2016 and subsequently renewed three times:
The Department of Justice previously released to Judicial Watch the heavily redacted Page warrant applications. The initial Page FISA warrant was granted just weeks before the 2016 election.[National Security Division] FOIA consulted [Office of Intelligence] … to identify and locate records responsive to [Judicial Watch’s] FOIA request…. [Office of Intelligence] determined … that there were no records, electronic or paper, responsive to [Judicial Watch’s] FOIA request with regard to Carter Page. [Office of Intelligence] further confirmed that the [Foreign Surveillance Court] considered the Page warrant applications based upon written submissions and did not hold any hearings.
The arrogance of these people is astounding, as JW President Thomas Fitton points out:
“It is disturbing that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance courts rubber-stamped the Carter Page spy warrants and held not one hearing on these extraordinary requests to spy on the Trump team,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Perhaps the court can now hold hearings on how justice was corrupted by material omissions that Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the DNC, a conflicted Bruce Ohr, a compromised Christopher Steele, and anti-Trumper Peter Strzok were all behind the ‘intelligence’ used to persuade the courts to approve the FISA warrants that targeted the Trump team.”
It is extremely rare for a FISA court to deny a warrant request from the government. But don't you think that in a case where the government is proposing to spy on a political campaign of the opposition party that more careful consideration should have been warranted? It makes it appear that the Department of Justice wanted to avoid the extra scrutiny that a FISA judge would give the warrant request.
Carter Page was a minor aide who apparently bragged about his connections to Russia and exaggerated his influence with Trump. He did it to make money fraudulently. This makes him a crook, not a spy. He was no more a threat to national security than my pet cat Snowball. But bugging him and reading his emails would give DoJ an immediate entry into the inner workings of the Trump campaign.
And avoiding close examination by a judge into the reasons for the FISA warrant was more important than even a minimum amount of transparency with the FISA court.
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