The Justice Department published the FBI's applications to spy on Carter Page

The Department of Justice on Saturday made public the FBI's applications for warrants to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in connection to Russian election interference.

The 412-page release says the FBI "believe[d] Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government ... to undermine and influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election in violation of U.S. criminal law." Page denies such accusations and has not been charged. "I'm having trouble finding any small bit of this document that rises above complete ignorance and/or insanity," he told The Hill.

The heavily redacted applications were made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, also known as the FISA court, and were published thanks to information requests from media outlets and advocacy groups like the conservative Judicial Watch.

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The warrants obtained from this application were the subject of dueling memos released by the Democratic and Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee earlier this year. The memo from Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) alleged these FISA applications were illicitly based on the Steele dossier, which was created with funding from a Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer, not telling the court the information's source. A counter-memo released by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said the dossier was only narrowly used in the surveillance application, with proper identification of its political provenance.

Read Saturday's publication here.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.