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[quote=Anonymous]Missed this thread earlier. [url=https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/09/the-grassley-letter-everyone-is-ignoring-is-way-more-important-than-the-nunes-memo-216956]This Politico piece[/url] makes some interesting points:

[quote]
[b]Neither Grassley nor Nunes really grapple with the critical question of why, if the evidence was so thin, surveillance on Page was renewed on three separate occasions, including once during the Trump administration. [/b]Normally, after all, the FISA court would ask for evidence that the previous three months of wiretaps had produced some substantive intelligence before acceding to a renewal. [b]But the question of whether the initial order was adequately justified is an important one, even if the surveillance did bear fruit. The Constitution demands that searches be supported by probable cause before they are carried out, not retroactively justified by the fact that evidence was found. 
[/b]
If the Grassley letter is accurate, it should provoke a debate, not about whether some cabal within the FBI had chosen Carter Page as the unlikely vehicle for a byzantine plot against Trump, [b]but about whether the FISA process is rigorous enough to protect the civil liberties of all Americans, including those without high political connections. This is no longer a question of whether the FBI concealed information from the FISA court, but of whether the court looked at a relatively meager body of evidence and signed off on a wiretap anyway. [/b]That wouldn’t imply a personal conspiracy against Trump, but a deficiency in the mechanism by which thousands of targeted FISA warrants—more than 300 focused on Americans in 2016—are routinely approved. [b]The problem, in other words, would not be that the Page application got exceptionally lax scrutiny, but rather that it didn’t.[/b][/quote][/quote]

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