In the leaks thread, Susan Hennessey, Shannon Togawa Mercer, and Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare analyze the recent leaks in The New York Times and CNN in which Paul Manafort is revealed to be under apparent imminent indictment and was wiretapped under FISA, and discuss the nature of these leaks:
The CNN story is a different matter. The story discloses FISA wiretaps against a named U.S. person. Whatever Paul Manafort may have done, he is a citizen of this country, and this is an egregious civil liberties violation. It’s also a significant compromise of national security information. Simply put, FISA information should never leak. When it does, it erodes the systems through which the government protects national security—and it rightly erodes public confidence that the systems designed to protect civil liberties work as intended.
Political leaking of wiretapping information is the stuff of the Hoover era. It has no legitimate place in our politics.
Who is responsible for this particular leak is unclear. …
For what it’s worth, a congressional or political echelon leak here seems to us more likely than either an investigative leak from Mueller’s shop or a leak from the court. The FISA court has been a black box since its creation in 1978. Mueller’s shop has been very quiet since its inception—and these leaks are to a considerable degree at his expense. The world, after all, now knows (assuming the story is true) that he has Manafort tapes during a period in which Trump was talking to Manafort; and Trump now has a great talking point about how his claims of having had his “wires tapped” have been vindicated. In that sense, at least, it’s a bad day for Mueller.
I think they are a little ambiguous in the first paragraph, and I will simply have to guess the civil liberties violation is the leak itself, not the FISA wiretap.
