by Chuck Ross
In an unprecedented move, the Department of Justice has released 412 pages of top-secret documents related to surveillance conducted against former Trump campaign chairman Carter Page.
The documents include an October 2016 application and three renewal applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants taken out against Page.
The New York Times and other news outlets obtained the applications through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
“This application targets Carter Page,” reads the FISA application, according to The Times.
“The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government,” it continues, before a redaction.
The Justice Department and FBI obtained four FISA warrants in all to conduct surveillance against Page, an energy consultant who joined the Trump campaign in March 2016.
Republican and Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence previously released highlights from the documents. A memo released by Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has revealed that the Justice Department and FBI relied heavily on the Democrat-funded Steele dossier in the FISA applications. That despite the dossier being mostly uncorroborated now and at the time it was used in the applications.
In the dossier, former British spy Christopher Steele alleged that during a trip to Moscow in July 2016, Page met secretly with two sanctioned Kremlin insiders, Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin, as part of a collusion scheme involving the Trump campaign.
Steele also alleged that Page worked with Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to exchange information with Russian operatives. Page has vehemently denied the dossier’s allegations, and says he has never spoken to Manafort. He also says he has never met Sechin and Diveykin.
“This is an unprecedented moment in FOIA transparency, as never before has a FISA warrant been processed for release,” Bradley Moss, a national security attorney who filed one of the numerous lawsuits for the Page documents, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Now, with the actual documents in hand, not political spin written by lawmakers with agendas, the American public can make their own decision on whether anything was inappropriate about the surveillance of Carter Page,” added Moss, who is deputy executive director for the James Madison Project, a government transparency group.
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