The current debate over Page is whether the FBI overreached by seeking a warrant to spy on him from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the end of 2016. Republicans claim the FBI improperly relied on the opposition research dossier. Democrats say the Republican memo omits information that would discredit the GOP’s case.
But that misses a broader and more important point. It’s a scandal that the public has known for more than a year that the FBI suspected Page of being a foreign agent in the first place. He has yet to be charged with a crime, but his reputation is in tatters because an element of the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s influence over the 2016 election has been publicly reported.
This started when Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff broke the first big story on Page’s meetings in Moscow with Putin aides in September 2016, allegedly to discuss the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Russia. Isikoff was tipped off by Steele, who was commissioned through an opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, to dig up dirt on Trump’s ties to Russia on behalf of the Clinton campaign. In a podcast this week, Isikoff confirmed that Steele told him he had “taken this information to the FBI and the bureau is very interested.”
Last April, the Washington Post reported, based on information from “law enforcement and other U.S. officials,” that the FBI had obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, warrant on Page in the summer of 2016. As the Post reported at the time, the existence of the warrant was “the clearest evidence so far that the FBI had reason to believe during the 2016 presidential campaign that a Trump campaign adviser was in touch with Russian agents.”
That was an important piece of news that any journalist would publish. But the officials who leaked and confirmed it violated the public’s trust in two important ways.
This didn’t just happen. It was a partisan hit job.