Page saw Evans as the only “holdup” on getting a wiretap approved. She applied what pressure she could. “I communicated you and boss’s green light to Stu earlier, and just sent an email to Stu asking where things stood,” she texted McCabe. “This might take a high-level push.”
False accusations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia have already cost some of the most senior officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice their reputations, their careers, or both. The widespread wrongdoing raises the question: Where were the honest lawmen and women? Was there no one willing to challenge superiors -- or even just colleagues -- gone rogue?
There may have been at least one. As deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Intelligence, Stuart Evans had the responsibility of vetting spy warrants before submitting them to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In the fall of 2016, the FBI presented Evans with an application for a warrant to capture the communications of volunteer Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. The main justification for getting a wire on Page were allegations by former British spy Christopher Steele. Instead of credulously embracing the Steele dossier as so many others did, Evans demanded more information about Steele. He put up bureaucratic roadblocks and manned them stubbornly while asking the essential questions no one else seemed to care about.
Evans came close to saving Justice and the FBI from themselves. But he made one mistake. The story of how that mistake allowed Evans to be outmaneuvered is a lesson in the limits of confronting bureaucracies – even if one is a study in integrity.
The FBI launched operation “Crossfire Hurricane” -- the counterintelligence investigation into whether the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia – on July 31, 2016. Within weeks the team, led by FBI agent Peter Strzok, was asking for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant. But at that early stage of the investigation, lawyers with the FBI’s Office of General Counsel didn’t think there was enough evidence to establish probable cause. That changed when the Crossfire Hurricane crew obtained the Steele dossier on Sept. 19. Attorneys with the general counsel’s office gave their go-ahead.
A month before the 2016 election, the FBI took to the Justice Department the first official drafts requesting a surveillance warrant on Page. The drafts went to the National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence (OI), whose supervisor was Deputy Assistant Attorney General Evans.
The bureau asserted, based on unsubstantiated claims made by Steele, that Carter Page was coordinating with Russia to throw the U.S. election to Trump. The Justice Department inspector general would later find that “the FISA request form drew almost entirely from Steele's reporting.”
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