This work originally appeared on Justthenews.com.
or much of the last three years, key law enforcement leaders have insisted they did nothing wrong in pursuing counterintelligence surveillance warrants targeting the Trump campaign starting during the 2016 election. And, they’ve added, if mistakes were made, they were unintentional process errors downstream from them and not an effort to deceive the judges.
But in a little-noted passage in a recent order, U.S. District Judge James A. Boasberg, the new chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, took direct aim at the excuses and blame-shifting of these senior Obama administration FBI and DOJ officials.
In just 21 words, Boasberg provided the first judicial declaration the FBI had misled the court, not just committed process errors. “There is thus little doubt that the government breached its duty of candor to the Court with respect to those applications,” Boasberg wrote.
The no-fault mantra has been spread by everyone from President Trump’s former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who insisted the DOJ took its responsibility to submit “admissible evidence, credible witnesses” very seriously, to the ex-FBI Director James Comey, who declared recently it was “nonsense” to suggest the bureau opened a probe without good cause.
