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Undated: The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC, also called the FISA Court) is a U.S. federal court established and authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies inside the United States by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Such requests are made most often by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Congress created FISA and its court as a result of the recommendations by the U.S. Senate's Church Committee.[1] In 2013, The New York Times said "it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court."[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court
-- 2016 --
October 31: Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?
This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting.
The conversation between the Trump and Alfa [bank] servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States.
The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn ... it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”
Soon after the New York Times began to ask questions, the traffic between the [Trump and Alpha Bank] servers stopped cold.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_server_registered_to_the_trump_organization_communicating_with_russia.html
-- 2017 --
March 4: Everything you need to know about FISA wiretaps
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fisa-wiretaps/story?id=45913892
March 4: Trump's Wiretapping Claim Based on Reports of FBI Warrants
http://fortune.com/2017/03/04/trump-wiretapping-fbi-warrent/
March 20: Trump wiretapping claim: Did Obama bug his successor?
They were arguably Donald Trump's most striking claims to date: a series of tweets, accusing then-President Barack Obama of wire-tapping Trump Tower during the election.
They were not backed up by any evidence, and Mr Obama's spokesman and former US intelligence chief James Clapper denied that any wiretap had been ordered.
President Trump urged Congress to investigate, alongside its current investigations into allegations of Russian hacking during the election. But still no evidence has emerged.
FBI Director James Comey for the first time on Monday confirmed to the House Intelligence Committee that the agency is investigating possible links between Russia and Mr Trump's associates as part of a broader inquiry into Moscow's interference in last year's election.
He also disputed Mr Trump's wiretapping claims.
"Are you going to take the tweets literally?" asked [Republican Devin ...] Nunes. "If so, clearly the president was wrong."
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39172635
March 20: With no evidence, President Donald Trump called it a “fact” that “President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!” He compared the alleged surveillance to the criminal acts of “Nixon/Watergate.”
It was a startling and serious allegation about a former president, made in a series of four tweets on March 4. Yet, Trump provided no support for it, and the White House remained silent for a day. When the White House press office finally got around to explaining the president’s tweets, it undercut Trump’s baseless claim
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/03/examining-trumps-wiretap-claim/
April 11: FBI obtained FISA warrant to monitor Trump adviser Carter Page ...
The FBI obtained a secret court order last summer to monitor the communications of an adviser to presidential candidate Donald Trump, part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign, law enforcement and other U.S. officials said.
The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page’s communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-obtained-fisa-warrant-to-monitor-former-trump-adviser-carter-page/2017/04/11/620192ea-1e0e-11e7-ad74-3a742a6e93a7_story.html?utm_term=.013c2a12918b
September 18: Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was wiretapped by U.S. government investigators both before and after the 2016 presidential election, according to a report out Monday night.
The wiretapping was authorized by a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court after the FBI started to investigate Manafort, 68, in 2014, CNN reported. He's been under scrutiny over his financial dealings and lobbying efforts with pro-Russia and Ukrainian officials but has denied colluding with Russia to influence the election.
The order to monitor Manafort was discontinued in 2016, but investigators obtained another FISA warrant that stretched into early 2017, according to the report.
Warrants of this nature are difficult to come by, as the FISA court and its orders are highly secretive. Judges grant permission to surveil people they think may be working as an agent of a foreign power.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/09/18/former-trump-campaign-chair-paul-manafort-wiretapped-by-us-investigators-report-says.html
-- 2018 --
January 11: House passes FISA reauthorization despite Trump tweet criticizing the program ... The vote was 256-164. It now goes to the Senate for consideration.
http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/11/politics/fisa-house-vote-congress/index.html
January 11: Trump wants fewer immigrants from “shithole countries” and more from places like Norway ... He reportedly made the racist remarks during a meeting Thursday.
President Trump reportedly referred to Haiti and countries in Africa as “shithole countries” and called for more immigrants from places like Norway at an Oval Office meeting with lawmakers ...
The meeting was intended to hammer out an immigration deal that would extend protections and offer a path to citizenship to DACA recipients, but also include money for border security and reforms to some immigration programs.
https://www.vox.com/2018/1/11/16880750/trump-immigrants-shithole-countries-norway
January 11: President Donald Trump on Thursday referred to Haiti and African nations as "shithole countries" during a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House, a Democratic aide briefed on the meeting told NBC News.
Trump's comments were first reported by The Washington Post, which said the group of nations referred to also included El Salvador.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-haiti-african-countries-shithole-nations-n836946
January 11: “Why are we having all these people from s---hole countries come here?” the president said ...
The president also suggested the United States should admit more people from countries like Norway instead ...
The comments followed a recent report in the New York Times that Trump said the people of Haiti “all have AIDS” and the people from Nigeria would never “go back to their huts” in Africa after receiving visas to enter the United States. But White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said at the time that the report was false.
Sanders said senior staffers who were “actually in the meeting deny these outrageous claims and it's both sad and telling the New York Times would print the lies of their anonymous 'sources' anyway.”
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/01/11/trump-laments-immigration-from-s-hole-countries-in-oval-office-negotiations.html
January 11: It's always worth a reminder that there is no real limit to how far the reputation of the United States can fall. Polling indicates approval of the U.S. and its president have fallen catastrophically over the last year among citizens of other nations, and a building consensus holds that China is seizing the mantle of world leader.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a15064589/trump-shithole-countries/
July 21: Carter Page FISA Documents Are Released by Justice Department
The Trump administration disclosed on Saturday a previously top-secret set of documents related to the wiretapping of Carter Page, the onetime Trump campaign adviser who was at the center of highly contentious accusations by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee that the F.B.I. had abused its surveillance powers.
Democrats in February rejected the Republican claims that law enforcement officials had improperly obtained a warrant to monitor Mr. Page, accusing them of putting out misinformation to defend President Trump and sow doubts about the origin of the Russia investigation. But even as Republicans and Democrats issued dueling memos characterizing the materials underlying the surveillance of Mr. Page, the public had no access to the records.
On Saturday evening, those materials — an October 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap Mr. Page, along with several renewal applications — were released to The New York Times and other news organizations that had filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to obtain them. Mr. Trump had declassified their existence earlier this year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/us/politics/carter-page-fisa.html
July 22: Newly Disclosed FISA Applications Disprove ‘Witch Hunt’ Claims From Trump, Nunes
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/07/fisa-documents-dispel-witch-hunt-claims-from-trump-nunes.html
July 23: Fact-checking Trump's weekend of misleading FISA tweets
President Donald Trump's two-day tweet storm over the Justice Department's release of a redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant fueled the raging debate over the October 2016 warrant on former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.
The President's tweets were also full of misleading and several false statements.
The tweets on the Page FISA warrant added to the litany of complaints he's raised about the FBI's investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign, which he's repeatedly dismissed as a "witch hunt" and a "hoax" and insisted there was no collusion.
The initial October 2016 FISA warrant application and the three renewals -- the first ever FISA warrant documents to be publicly released -- did not resolve those larger collusion questions, but they did show in plain English the FBI's argument for conducting surveillance on Page.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/23/politics/donald-trump-fisa-tweets/index.html
July 23: Donald Trump falsely says new Carter Page documents show Steele dossier launched Russia probe
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/23/donald-trump/donald-trump-falsely-says-new-carter-page-document/
September 18: ‘Really bad things were happening’: Trump suggests that his declassifying Russia documents will expose FBI wrongdoing
Trump’s supporters in Congress have argued that releasing the full document would show the unfair nature of the surveillance. In particular, they have focused on the first FISA order in October 2016. But the president’s order focuses on pages from the June 2017 FISA order — after Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate Russian interference — which could contain more recent details of what the FBI has found.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/really-bad-things-were-happening-trump-suggests-his-declassifying-russia-documents-will-expose-fbi-wrongdoing/2018/09/18/8cdad79e-bb45-11e8-bdc0-90f81cc58c5d_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d14a3f156a11
-- 2019 --
-- 2020 --
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