SECRET COURT SCOLDS FBI

The secretive federal court that approved the surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page on Tuesday accused FBI agents of creating a misleading impression about their basis for requesting a warrant and ordered the bureau to overhaul its process.

In a blistering order, a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) accused the bureau of providing false information and withholding materials that would have undercut its four surveillance applications.

“The FBI’s handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the OIG report, was antithetical to the heightened duty of candor described above,” Rosemary Collyer, presiding judge with the FISC, wrote in the order released by the court.

The judge gave the FBI until Jan. 10 to provide the court a sworn statement detailing how it plans to overhaul its approach to future surveillance applications.

The order comes after the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a report earlier this month on its investigation into the Trump campaign and the 2016 election, with Inspector General Michael Horowitz detailing a series of missteps taken during the investigation.

The FBI said it would take more than 40 “corrective steps” in response to the watchdog report.

The surveillance court judge said Tuesday that the inspector general report documented “troubling instances in which FBI personnel provided information to NSD [the National Security Division of the Justice Department] which was unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession.”