Michael Horowitz
An FBI agent primarily responsible for “significant” errors in the FISA process mentioned in the DOJ IG’s FISA abuse report has been identified.
“Case Agent 1” was identified by the New York Times as Stephen A. Somma, a counterintelligence investigator who worked in the FBI’s New York field office.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz admonished the FBI for making “17 significant errors and inaccuracies” when it sought and obtained a total of four FISA warrants on Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.
Somma was “primarily responsible for some of the most significant errors and omissions” and he was the agent who initially sought a FISA warrant on Carter Page, according to the IG report.
Somma’s first FISA request was rejected, but later got approved after he used information provided by Christopher Steele’s garbage Hillary-funded dossier — he omitted the fact that Steele was his primary source for information in the Russia dossier.
Horowitz said that Somma along with an unnamed Staff Operations Specialist “were the original Crossfire Hurricane team members who had primary responsibility over the Carter Page investigation.” FBI documents showed that in August 2016 right after Crossfire Hurricane was opened, Somma was told he had “not yet presented enough information to support a FISA application targeting Carter Page.”
Somma told the IG’s investigators “that the team’s receipt of the reporting from Steele in September supplied missing information in terms of what Page may have been doing during his July 2016 visit to Moscow and provided enough information on Page’s recent activities that he thought would satisfy the Office of Intelligence.”
“Case Agent 1 said he prepared the FISA request form,” Horowitz said. “The FISA request form drew almost entirely from Steele’s reporting in describing the factual basis to establish probable cause to believe that Page was an agent of a foreign power.”
“We found no information indicating that the FBI provided the Office of Intelligence with the documents containing Page’s denials before finalizing the first FISA application,” Horowitz wrote. “Instead, Case Agent 1 provided a summary that did not contain those denials to the OI Attorney and that the OI Attorney relied upon that summary in drafting the first application.”
As usual, Horowitz covered for Somma and said he didn’t have enough information to determine “whether it was sheer gross incompetence that led to this versus intentional misconduct or anything in between.”
Last month the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] admitted in a secret order that at least two of the spy warrants against Carter Page were not lawfully authorized.
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