Inspector General Reports Widespread Problems With FBI Surveillance

An inquiry by Inspector General Michael Horowitz into how the FBI handles some of its most sensitive surveillance work found “widespread” failure to follow one of the key rules in the program, revealing a broader pattern of failure by agents to adhere to their own standards on a wide variety of espionage and terrorism cases, reports the Washington Post. The findings grew out of an earlier probe of how the FBI investigated the Donald Trump campaign for possible ties to Russia in the 2016 election, which discovered more than a dozen major errors or omissions with the surveillance application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.

In 2020, Horowitz released initial findings that within the 29 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications reviewed, there were 209 errors, four of which the Justice Department deemed material to the investigations. The most recent report examined thousands of other applications to the FISA court and found similar problems in a time period ranging from 2015 to early 2020. Horowitz focused in particular on what FBI officials call the “Woods file” — a document meant to ensure the accuracy of all statements made to the FISA court, finding that in 183 cases out of the more than 7,000 FISA applications reviewed— about 2.6 percent — the Woods file was either partially or completely missing. As part of Horowitz’s inquiry, a closer look at the original 29 FISA applications found “over 400 instances of non-compliance with the Woods Procedures.”