I was pulling up something else from Ron Wyden’s site, and noticed a sentence in this release pointing out how last week’s so-called transparency dump from James Clapper actually shows the lies the Intelligence Community told to Congress. I didn’t see the first time I looked at it.
Similarly misleading statements about the bulk email records program were also made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, though these statements unfortunately remain classified.
As I’ve noted before, John Brennan testified that he submitted CIA interrogation derived evidence to the FISA Court, almost certainly in the “scary memos” he submitted to justify the continuation of Cheney’s illegal wiretap program.
Burr: I’m still not clear on whether you think the information from CIA interrogations saved lives. Have you ever made a representation to a court, including the FISA court, about the type and importance of information learned from detainees including detainees in the CIA detention and interrogation program?
Brennan: Ahm, first of all, in the first part of your question, as to you’re not sure whether I believe that there has been information … I don’t know myself.
Burr: I said I wasn’t clear whether I understood, whether whether I was clear.
Brennan: And I’m not clear at this time either because I read a report that calls into question a lot of the information that I was provided earlier on, my impressions. Um. There, when I was in the government as the head of the national counterterrorism center I know that I had signed out a number of um affirmations related to the uh continuation of certain programs uh based on the analysis and intelligence that was available to analysts. I don’t know exactly what it was at the time, but we can take a look at that.
Burr: But the committee can assume that you had faith if you made that claim to a court or including the FISA court, you had faith in the documents in the information that was supplied to you to make that declaration.
Brennan: Absolutely. At the time if I had made any such affirmation, i would have had faith that the information I was provided was an accurate representation. [my emphasis]
While Wyden’s hinted misrepresentations are probably more modest — probably relating to how important the information derived from the Internet metadata collection really was — it nevertheless adds to the evidence that the non-adversarial nature of the FISA Court has allowed the Executive Branch to lie to the judges who preside there.