The Hack Picked by the FISA Court to Reform Their Abuses Is Even Worse Than You Thought

FILE - In this Sept. 23, 2009, file photo Assistant Attorney General David Kris, the top terrorism official in the Obama administration's Justice Department, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington on the reauthorization of the Patriot Act. When he spoke at a conference of lawyers in November 2009, Kris marveled at the volume of terrorism cases in the U.S. in 2009, more suspects charged than in any year since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

Last week, my colleague Nick Arama shared the news that the FISA Court had appointed David Kris to assess the abuses that were reported in the IG report. These dealt with warrants garnered against Carter Page, which were found to have material omissions, and in some cases, outright lies pushed to get their approval.

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So who is Kris? He’s a former DOJ official who was appointed by Barack Obama and served under Eric Holder. He’s also a partisan hack who spent the last three years excusing FBI abuse, misstating facts, and trashing Devin Nunes for being correct in his assessments on FISA abuse.

As Nick noted with various examples in his piece, this is just an unbelievably awful and brazenly corrupt choice.

But just in case you thought it couldn’t get worse, Kris’ past statements and bias are being exposed in new detail.

For example, he was a favorite of MSNBC, even going on TV to bat around conspiracy theories with Rachel Maddow. This was apparently a big enough moment for him to go brag about it on Twitter.

This isn’t just some bureaucrat who’s biased (those are a dime a dozen). This is a political operative who pointedly accused the Trump administration of corruption for exposing the abuse he was aware of and helped foment as a member of the DOJ. Kris wrote multiple op-eds and made several appearances trashing anyone who dared to question the veracity of the FBI’s claims about the abuse of Carter Page. He’s been a propagandist on the issue, ignoring the facts as they were brought forward in order to push the same, tired Trump-Russia narrative.

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Worse, Kris was also at the center of an Obama-era decision to not prosecute the financial crimes of terrorist-promoting groups like CAIR. Here are the details from an article by PJ Media back in 2011.

According to these congressional sources, one case that was scuttled by Assistant Attorney General David Kris (who wrote the memo declining to prosecute Omar Ahmad in the Holy Land Foundation case) was a tax evasion and money laundering prosecution prepared by the U.S. attorney’s office in the eastern district of Virginia. The targets of these indictments would have been several Muslim leaders of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and the now-defunct SAAR Foundation/SAFA Group, who were investigated and raided for a wide range of activities to support foreign terrorist organizations.

That case was part of an investigation that targeted Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leader Sami Al-Arian, who was charged with contempt by the federal judge in the IIIT/SAAR case for refusing to testify about how the groups had financially and materially supported Al-Arian’s PIJ front based in Tampa, Florida, despite his plea agreement requiring him to do so. Because of Al-Arian’s lack of cooperation in the IIIT/SAAR case, federal prosecutors were only prepared to indict the IIIT/SAAR leaders on the money laundering and tax evasion charges.

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Further, Kris was a Russian collusion truther, parroting the oft-heard “the walls are closing in” rhetoric during the Mueller investigation.

Kris was likewise guilty of running to use the left-wing spin explanation that the IG didn’t find any “bias” in his report, an idea the IG himself directly pushed back on during Congressional testimony. In short, he’s been at the forefront of every Democrat talking point surrounding Trump, Russia, and FISA abuse.

This, per The Federalist:

When the IG report came out, Kris was in lockstep with the spin that the leakers had put out for the weeks leading up to the release of the Horowitz report. He said, as the pre-report leakers asserted through friends in the media, that the “main finding” was that there was no bias and that the claims of critics were fully repudiated. He did acknowledge some mistakes, but downplayed them.

And this is who the FISC chooses to help “reform” their procedures? You can’t make up hackery this brazen.

If their tepid buck-passing wasn’t enough to convince Congress that the FISA court needs to go, this should do it. These are political actors looking to protect themselves and it’s obvious by the appointment of Kris. They know he’s going to toe the line and cover up their malfeasance just as he did publicly the last several years. It’s an absolute travesty that this is how our “trusted” institutions choose to operate and it’s clear that more “accountability” isn’t going to help. It’s time to close up shop on these crooks.

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