JAMES BOVARD: FBI objections lacked credibility given bureau’s shady past.

The FISA court complained that, in the final years of Obama’s presidency, the NSA was guilty of “an institutional lack of candor” connected to “a very serious Fourth Amendment issue;” naturally, the gory specifics were kept under wraps. Regardless, one of Obama’s last actions as president authorized NSA to share its vast trove of data on Americans with other federal agencies. If political abuse of data seized via FISA has not yet occurred, Obama’s “shovel-far-and-wide” bureaucratic bonanza makes it far more likely in the future.

The FISA court has always done a dismal job of overseeing the vast surveillance regime it helped spawn. FISA provided a stamp of legitimacy for perpetual deceit and perhaps the worst trampling of constitutional rights in American history.

Not to mention what looks increasingly like an attempt, first to rig an election, and then to effectively overturn the results of it.