Baker was asked whether he is comfortable with the wiretap application that resulted. Baker said he recently went back and looked at it, although, as a private citizen now, he could only view the heavily-redacted version and try to remember what was in the blacked-out parts. “My recollection at the time is that when I read it, I asked questions about it, but nevertheless I was comfortable that the application that we were submitting to the FISA court was consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States and was consistent with the requirements of the FISA statute and lawful,” Baker said.
The FISA court approved the application, and three renewals as well.
In the end, Baker might be right. It might have been entirely lawful to submit so much wrong information to the court and as a result be granted a warrant to wiretap a former Trump adviser in pursuit of a crime that had not actually occurred. And, given the extensive redactions, there is still much about the warrant that the public does not know. But even now, with the help of the Mueller report, the public knows that FBI was wrong, big time, about Carter Page. And that cannot create much confidence in the rest of the bureau’s long and wide-ranging investigation of the president’s 2016 campaign.
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