FISA WARRANTS

The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or FISA Court is a controversial act signed into law in 1978.  The court was established to (quotes in italics) oversee requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies inside the United States by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Such requests are made most often by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Congress created FISA and its court as a result of the recommendations by the U.S. Senate's Church Committee.^[1] In 2013, The New York Times said "it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court."^*  

The reference is far more extensive than this long excerpt, and readers are urged to look at it.  The current controversy over the Act is hardly the first one.  For a list of the current and former judges, see the reference.

To get a surveillance warrant, an appeal must be made before a court overseen by one of eleven judges selected by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, now John Roberts.  It should be known that John Roberts was a Republican nominee by Bush 43.  It is safe to say that most or all the FISA judges now are Republicans also.  As of 2017, Chief Justice John Roberts has appointed all of the current judges, four of whom were nominated to their District Court judgeships by a Democratic President.*

Over the entire 33-year period [1978-2012], the FISA court granted 33,942 warrants, with only 12 denials – a rejection rate of 0.03 percent of the total requests. This does not include the number of warrants that were modified by the FISA court..*

The peak years for FISA warrants up to 2014, came in the 2005-2008 period (Bush-43's second term) when over 2,000 warrants were granted each year.  Some FISA Warrant requests have been deemed to be modified by the court before approval but now the requirement for modification was made before 2000.  The peak years for modification came during the years 2003- 2007  when between 50 and 100 requests needed to be modified.  To renew a FISA Warrant, progress must be shown on the surveillance.

The accusation of being a "rubber stamp" was rejected by FISA Court president Reggie B. Walton who wrote in a letter to Senator Patrick J. Leahy: "The annual statistics provided to Congress by the Attorney General ... – frequently cited to in press reports as a suggestion that the Court's approval rate of application is over 99% – reflect only the number of final applications submitted to and acted on by the Court. These statistics do not reflect the fact that many applications are altered to prior or final submission or even withheld from final submission entirely, often after an indication that a judge would not approve them." He added: "There is a rigorous review process of applications submitted by the executive branch, spearheaded initially by five judicial branch lawyers who are national security experts and then by the judges, to ensure that the court's authorizations comport with what the applicable statutes authorize."^[ In a following letter Walton stated that the government had revamped 24.4% of its requests in the face of court questions and demands in time from July 1, 2013 to September 30, 2013.* 
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Some requests are modified by the court but ultimately granted, while the percentage of denied requests is statistically negligible (11 denied requests out of around 34,000 granted in 35 years – equivalent to 0.03%). The accusation that the FISC is a "rubber stamp" court was also rejected by Robert S. Litt (General Counsel of Office of the Director of National Intelligence): "When [the Government] prepares an application for [a section 215 order, it] first submit[s] to the [FISC] what's called a "read copy", which the court staff will review and comment on. [A]nd they will almost invariably come back with questions, concerns, problems that they see. And there is an iterative process back and forth between the Government and the [FISC] to take care of those concerns so that at the end of the day, we're confident that we're presenting something that the [FISC] will approve. That is hardly a rubber stamp. It's rather extensive and serious judicial oversight of this process."*

The New York Times (July 2013) reported that anyone suspected of being involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage or cyber-attacks, according to the court, may be considered a legitimate target for warrantless surveillance
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The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans".

Though FISA Warrants have long been controversial, the latest claim
On April 11, [2016] the Washington Post reported that the FBI had been granted a FISA warrant in the summer of 2016 to monitor then Trump adviser Carter Page. According to the report, "The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page's communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials." The report also states that the warrant has been renewed multiple times since its first issue.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court