While the government has made great strides in increasing transparency relating to FISA in recent years, this kind of application inherently deals with highly sensitive investigations: the possibility that a person might be involved in activities such as spying for a foreign government, planning to sabotage the United States, or plotting terrorist attacks. In addition, the applications are often based entirely or in part on classified information, such as tips from allied nations or morsels of intelligence gleaned by the U.S. intelligence community. Consequently, the only people who have seen this kind of application are the very small circle of cleared government lawyers and intelligence analysts who prepare them, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and its staff, and the equally small number of other people in the national-security community who meet the requirements for access: They’ve been cleared for the information, and they have a need to know it in order to carry out their lawfully authorized government functions.

The applications appear to be well-supported. The 412 pages of documents include the initial application and three renewals, each designed to extend the surveillance beyond the 90-day limit that protects U.S. persons against prolonged surveillance without court oversight or intervention.

There are a number of redactions, to be sure. But there is also a great deal of information in the unclassified text that points to the way in which the government made its argument: a section on the FBI’s knowledge of Russian-intelligence tradecraft generally; its awareness of Russian election interference writ large; a description of the Russian government’s attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election specifically; and a description of the FBI’s assertions regarding Page’s interactions with Russian government officials and Russian intelligence officers. Like police seeking search warrants, the government must only provide probable cause, rather than meet the higher standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt required for criminal convictions. The facts asserted in the un-redacted portions of the documents all support the conclusion reached by four separate FISC judges: that the government had indeed established probable cause.

The most controversial source of information was accurately described to the court. Back in February 2018, a war of dueling memos erupted in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The HPSCI majority, led by Representative Devin Nunes (who was supposed to have recused himself from all things Russia), issued a memo alleging that the FISA process was abused in this case because the FISC had never been told that Steele’s now-famous dossier of allegations—published a year earlier by BuzzFeed, and some of which referred to Page—had been paid for as opposition research for the 2016 presidential campaign. The released documents show that the FBI did indeed tell the FISC about this potential bias in lengthy footnotes in all four applications that made clear that the work of “Source #1” (Steele) had been commissioned for the likely purpose of discrediting the presidential campaign of “Candidate #1.”