FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

---

British Intelligence Ties Are at Stake in Declassification Order

Sept. 18, 2018 (EIRNS)—Among the wailings in the media by “former law-enforcement officials and national security experts” against President Donald Trump’s declassification order, those of recently retired FBI special agent Frank Montoya, Jr., a fervent supporter of former FBI Director James Comey, are of note. Montoya, in essence, warns that Trump’s order could bring down the entire, decades-long British intelligence penetration of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Montoya is quoted today in Business Insider’s piece titled “ ‘Off the Charts’: National Security Experts Sound the Alarm After Trump Moves To Selectively Declassify the Carter Page FISA Application.” (Every one of the “experts” cited worked in either the Obama or G.W. Bush Administrations and have long been activists in the anti-Trump coup operation.) Montoya told Business Insider, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the FISA Court, that “the FISA process is secret for a reason: To protect sources and methods.” Montoya argues, in BI’s paraphrase, that

“publicly disclosing more details from the [Carter] Page FISA application could not only compromise such information, but risk the U.S.’s relationship with its partners in the intelligence community,”

before quoting Montoya again: “No question, we are crossing a major red line if we do that. We cannot do our work without those sources.”

As is well-known, those sources center around MI6’s high-level operative Christopher Steele. Business Insider itself asserts about pages 17-34 of the application to the FISA court to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, which have been ordered declassified:

“Crucially, several parts of this section appear to contain information about confidential sources that Steele used while compiling his dossier, as well as Steele’s history as an FBI source.”