Presiding judge Rosemary Collyer, having returned from her vacation on Mars and just in time for her retirement, has demanded of the FBI revised procedures to ensure that the multiple frauds committed upon the court, including inclusion of fraudulent material, omission of exculpatory information, and the deliberate alteration of documents to mislead the court.  It was farcical to hear her, in the face of multiple felonies in a Deep State plot bordering on sedition, suggest that revised procedures for the handling and submitting of FISA applications is the answer to our chief law enforcement agency's attempt to overthrow a sitting president of the United States.

Did she just wake up?  Where has she been?

Back on February 2, 2018, a House Intelligence Committee memo, written when it was chaired by the now vindicated Rep. Devin Nunes, detailed the phoniness and falsification of the data used in the first and subsequent FISA warrants based primarily on the fraudulent Steele dossier.

 Nunes told how FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe admitted that without the now fully discredited Steele dossier, there would have been no FISA warrants and no subsequent Deep State coup against Trump under the guise of a counter-intelligence investigation:

The dossier, authored by former British spy Christopher Steele and commissioned by Fusion GPS, was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign through law firm Perkins Coie.  It included salacious and unverified allegations about Trump's connections to Russia.

The memo, which has been at the center of an intense power struggle between congressional Republicans and the FBI, specifically cites the DOJ and FBI's surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, saying the dossier "formed an essential part" of the application to spy on him[.] ...

The memo states that in December 2017, then FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe testified that "no surveillance warrant would have been sought" from the FISA court "without the Steele dossier information."

The memo also says Steele was eventually cut off from the FBI for being chatty with the media.  It says he was terminated in October 2016 as an FBI source "for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations — an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI."

Justice is supposed to be blind, but in her case and that of the other FISA court judges, it was brain-dead.  But Nunes did more than just release his damning memo.  He wrote a letter to Collyer herself detailing this same information, a letter that would cause any fair-minded jurist to haul some FBI tushies into court to give good reasons why they shouldn't be arrested and charged on the spot.  As Kimberly Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal:

On Feb. 7, 2018, Devin Nunes, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to Judge Collyer informing her of its findings in his probe of the FBI's Page application.  He wrote that "the Committee found that the FBI and DOJ failed to disclose the specific political actors paying for uncorroborated information" that went to the court, "misled the FISC regarding dissemination of this information," and "failed to correct these errors in the subsequent renewals."  Mr. Nunes asked the court whether any transcripts of FISC hearings about this application existed, and if so, to provide them to the committee.

Judge Collyer responded a week later, with a dismissive letter that addressed only the last request.  The judge observed that any such transcripts would be classified, that the court doesn't maintain a "systematic record" of proceedings and that, given "separation of power considerations," Mr. Nunes would be better off asking the Justice Department.  The letter makes no reference to the Intelligence Committee findings.

Wait, what?  Now she's shocked some two years after she was told with documented  evidence that the FBI was lying to her and the 11 FISA court judges?  Juries are supposed to be sequestered, away from related news and commentaries, not FISA judges supposedly there to protect us against the criminal abuses we have witnessed.

And where was Chief Justice John Roberts, who appoints the FISA judges and is supposedly monitoring their activities?  On November 26, 2018, I asked on this page, "What About Your FISA Judges, Justice Roberts?"  I asked why they were totally oblivious to the criminal fraud that was occurring around them and before them, oblivious to the point where one could legitimately ask if their blindness was willful and purposeful.

Their actions on behalf of one political campaign colluding with a corrupt DOJ and FBI to target a political opponent is not supposed to happen in a country based on the rule of law as administered by supposedly impartial judges.  Empowered to safeguard our national security against foreign actors, they essentially served as an extra-constitutional arm of the Hillary Clinton campaign as it colluded with foreign actors to stage a Deep State coup against duly elected President Donald J. Trump?

Chief Justice Roberts is the one who gets to appoint judges to the FISA court — every last one of them, judges like Rudolph Contreras, who granted a previously denied Michael Flynn FISA warrant.  His appointees are the ones who swallowed whole the contentions of the Obama administration using unverified material put together by a British agent and his Russian sources to aid one political party at the expense of another.

Most Americans know of the FISA court and its star chamber judges but not about it, which is that it is a borderline example of the prophetic warning about trading liberty for security and winding up with neither.  The potential abuse of FISA powers is enormous and the damage that has been done to our republic, and our politics has been staggering:

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court deals with some of the most sensitive matters of national security — terror threats and espionage.  Its work for the most part cannot be examined by the American public, by order of the Congress and the President.  It is a tribunal that is completely secret (or supposed to be), its structure largely one-sided, and its members unilaterally chosen by one person.

A rotating panel of federal judges at the FISC decides whether to grant certain types of government requests — wiretapping, data analysis, and other monitoring for "foreign intelligence purposes" of suspected terrorists and spies operating in the United States.

... [T]he 11 judges are appointed exclusively by the Chief Justice of the United States, without any supplemental confirmation from the other two branches of government.  John Roberts has named every member of the current court, as a well as a separate three-judge panel to hear appeals of FISC orders, known as the Court of Review.

The FISA court knew all of this or should have.  The remedy is to impose the appropriate criminal sanctions authorized by law.  As Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett notes:

A year and a half ago when the redacted FISA applications were first made public, it was obvious that the FBI relied almost entirely on Christopher Steele's phony "dossier" and that the FISA court was being lied to.  Back then, Collyer should have immediately ordered a "show cause contempt" hearing demanding that Comey, Sally Yates, Andrew McCabe, Dana Boente and Rod Rosenstein all appear before the court to explain why they should not be held in criminal contempt for deceiving judges in the four warrant applications they signed.  They swore that the information was true and verified when they knew or should have known it was not.  Collyer still isn't ordering a contempt hearing.  This is an appalling abdication of judicial duty.

Indeed it is. Imprisonment and/or disbarment for the lot of them is required.  After that, abolish the FISA court itself.  It is an unelected fourth branch of government with no real accountability.  We have sacrificed our liberty for its bogus promise of security, putting our democracy at risk.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and we see that happening before our very eyes.

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor's Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.