(08-03-2018 04:00 PM)tanqtonic Wrote:  

Quote:And remember, this is an ex parte proceeding. That means the rules are stricter. "Most of it is okay," is not good enough, because there is nobody to challenge the parts that might not be okay. Every single part has to be perfect, by the numbers, or it's no good.

This prompts, at least to me, the obvious question, "Why use some unverified information in an ex parte proceeding?"

Exactamundo. But that doesnt seem to be appreciated by some here.

I've seen disagreement at the level of verification that needs to be done on evidence presented in the FISA app (regardless of it being an ex parte proceeding). It took me forever to find the article I'd read, probably because it's from the Daily Caller (http://dailycaller.com/2018/03/04/fbi-dossier-verified/)

Quote:But national security experts and former FBI officials say that verification of each and every fact mentioned in FISA applications is not necessarily required.

“Evidence presented to the court does not have to be rigorously proved or corroborated. But it does have to be plausible and credible — not just rumor or hearsay,” Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The FBI can cite information that the bureau has not fully verified or corroborated as long as the source for the information is made clear and an assessment of the reliability of the information is included in the application...

So if FBI guidelines explicitly state that facts laid out in FISA applications must be verified, how could the bureau still rely on Steele’s unverified claims in order to obtain the warrant to snoop on Page?

One former FBI special agent says that the relevant fact that had to be verified was that Steele was a source of the information, not that his allegations were fully accurate.

“If you are including source reporting, you must accurately state that it is source reporting and characterize what the source said,” Asha Rangappa, the former agent, said in a recent Twitter exchange with TheDCNF.

“You would typically have a separate source file against which it would be checked. The ‘fact’ is that it is information reported by a source,” she said.

I'd forgotten when I read that article, that there was also a quote by Grassley and Graham who said there was "no additional information corroborating the dossier allegations against Mr. Page," which means that it's almost certainly correct that Schiff meant that some verified and some unverified aspects of the dossier were used as a part of the application.