FISA Scandal Timeline

Here's a timeline of the FISA scandal. It runs from Trump's acquisition of Carter Page until the termination of the 4th FISA warrant. Sources have mostly been omitted as this is all public knowledge that can be easily verified with a search engine. This timeline will be updated as news facts emerge or corrections are required.

2016

• March 26 - Trump personally appoints Carter Page to his foreign policy team. Page was a Russia-connected businessman who had previously been involved in an FBI sting operation against three Russian intelligence agents.
• April - Donald Trump becomes the presumptive Republican nominee.
• April - Hillary Clinton (et al) retains Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research against her soon-to-be opponent, led by former British spy Christopher Steele. They are paid over $160,000.
• June - FISA application for warrant against Carter Page denied.
• July 5 - Steele travels to Rome and meets there with FBI agents.
• July 7 - Carter Page gives a presentation in Moscow.
• July (late) - A counterintelligence investigation of Trump-Russia collusion is opened under FBI Agent Peter Strzok, operating under the supervision of Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Bill Priestrap. Strzok was heavily involved in the Clinton email investigation, having been one of the agents to personally interview Clinton.
• August 8 - Text from Strzok to FBI lawyer Lisa Page - whom he was having an affair with - states, "F Trump." (There are many similar text going all the way back to 2015.)
• August 15 -  Another text between the two references an "insurance plan" that was discussed in Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's office in the unlikely event that Donald Trump was elected.
• August 30 - House Democrats write a letter to FBI Director Comey requesting an investigation into Trump-Russia collusion.
• September 2 - Strzok informs Page that "potus [Obama] wants to know about everything we're doing."
• September - Steele briefs the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo News, the New Yorker, and CNN about his research.
• September (mid to late) - Steele again meets FBI contacts in Rome, where he gives them a "full briefing." The FBI covers his travel expenses for both trips.
• September 23 - Yahoo News leaks details of the memo.
• September 26 → October 19 - Over four presidential debates, the dominant theme is Russian collusion, by a wide margin. Trump quips that Russia should release Hillary's missing emails if they have them, which his opponents claim is proof of Russian collusion.
• October (mid) - Steele again meets with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Yahoo News.
• October 20 - NSA Director Mike Rogers is briefed of violations of 702 "About Queries." He orders the activity to be stopped and reports it to the DOJ. (The implication is that Trump was already being surveilled through 702 queries, although there has not yet been any substantiating evidence for that.)
• October 21 - Two days after the final debate, FBI agents acquire a FISA warrant against Carter Page, based on the dossier and the Yahoo News article which leaked it.
• October 26 - Rogers briefs the FISC full assembly on illegal 702 activities that were occurring.
• October 30 - Steele reveals his relationship with the FBI in a Mother Jones article by David Corn, for which he is terminated as a source. The FBI continues to use his research to justify FISA renewals.
• November 8 - Donald Trump elected.
• November 17 - Rogers visits Trump Tower without giving notice to the Obama White House. Many believe Trump was tipped off about the surveillance. Administration chiefs such as James Clapper and Ashton Carter demand Rogers's resignation.
• November 18 - Without prior warning, Trump moves his transition team headquarters from Trump Tower to the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
• December 9 - John McCain "delivers" the dossier to the FBI.
• December 22 - Michael Flynn calls the Russian ambassador, asking them to vote in favor of Israel at an upcoming UN Security Council Resolution.
• December 29 - Obama puts sanctions on Russia for tampering in the US election.
• December 29 - Michael Flynn asks the Russian ambassador to show restraint in their response to Obama's sanctions.

2017

• January 6 - Comey briefs President-elect Trump of the existence of the dossier, without specifying its background as opposition research. He assures Trump that he is not under investigation by the FBI.
• January 11 - The dossier is leaked to Buzzfeed, which publishes the entire contents.
• January 11 - John McCain explains his decision to hand the dossier over to the FBI, without explaining how he came about acquiring it. Later testimony claims he received it indirectly from Steele.
• January 12 - The Washington Post reports the two conversations Michael Flynn had with the Russian ambassador on December 22nd and 29th.
• January 12 - Barrack Obama issues EO 12333, making it easier to share raw NSA data across different agencies.
• January 20 - Donald Trump inaugurated as president.
• January 20 - In the last action of the Obama White House, Susan Rice sends an email to herself, minutes after Trump was sworn in. She documents that two weeks prior President Obama had instructed the Russia investigation to proceed "by the book."
• January 21 - Flynn is interviewed by the FBI without a lawyer. Documents show he failed to disclose the contents of his two conversations with the Russian ambassador.
• February 13 - Trump fires Flynn, citing dishonesty to the FBI and to Mike Pence.
• March 1 - The Washington Post reveals two meetings Jeff Sessions had with Russian diplomats 2016, with no source mentioned.
• March 4 - Trump tweets that Trump Tower was "wire tapped" just before the election. The media declare the accusations to be outrageous and fraudulent.
• March 27 - In a bizarre interview with MSNBC, Obama Defense Deputy Evelyn Farkas discusses how Trump's team was being monitored, and their late-game push to disseminate the intel to the various agencies.
• April 4 - New York Times publishes scathing indictment of Carter Page based on leaks from the investigation.  The reporting depicts a solid case of collusion with Russia. Democrats become assured the the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory is validated and that his presidency will be ended by the scandal.
• April 4 - In an interview with MSNBC, Susan Rice admits to unmasking names of US persons from intelligence reports to include in the presidential daily briefing (PDB).
• May 9 - Trump fires Comey. Publicly discloses recommendation by DAG Rod Rosenstein, who would later stand up and oversee the Mueller special counsel. Deputy Director Andy McCabe becomes the acting director.
• June 7 - Comey testifies before the HPSCI. Calls the dossier "salacious" and "unverified."
• August 3 - The Washington Post obtains the transcripts of Trump's private conversations with foreign heads of state.
• October 13 - Samantha Powers - member of Obama's tightest inner circle - testifies before the HPSCI. Reportedly, she was unmasking multiple Americans per day, logging as many as 260 in the final months before the transfer of power.
• Oct 21 (approx) - The 4th FISA warrant against Page expires.

2018

• January 9 - Trump lawyer Michael Cohen files lawsuits against Buzzfeed and Fusion GPS for wrongfully claiming he had traveled to Prague to meet with Russian officials. (Another man by the name of Michael Cohen had traveled to Prague at that time.) The lawsuit may force FusionGPS to divulge the source of their information.
• April 9 - Th FBI raids the Cohen's home and office, in response to allegations made by a porn star.
• April 13 - Cohen dirt leaked to the press, presumably from within the DOJ.
• April 13 - DOJ OIG releases its report on Deputy Director McCabe. It determined that he had broken FBI policies by lying four times, three of which were under oath. It also determined he had broken DOJ media policies when he authorized a leak acknowledging the existence of an investigation against the Clinton Foundation, which was done for personal, rather than departmental, gain. (He disclosed to a WSJ reporter that he had received pressure from a high-ranking DOJ official to kill the Clinton Foundation case.)

Analysis

It's worth understanding how the FISA warrant works. It's not literally a "wiretap warrant," like you might think of from old cop movies. The warrant didn't permit the FBI to start monitoring communications. They were already monitored. Everyone's electronic communications are collected and stored in massive data centers by the NSA. The warrant permits intelligence agencies to perform queries against the data. Here's the key detail: those queries would not be limited to Carter Page's direct communications. The warrant allows for two, possibly three "hops", or degrees of separation. So effectively, everyone in the Trump campaign would have been caught in this net, and everyone they communicated with. To spy on the organization, a warrant only needs to be obtained for one person. Past records can be retrieved as well; it is not necessarily limited to ongoing communications.

The warrant specifies the communications of the target. All other Americans caught up in the surveillance are masked. This is meant to stop FISA warrants from becoming a massive state domestic spying program. (It's been calculated that a 3-hops network can include up to 20 million people.) However, officials can request to have names unmasked. Obama's closest people made hundreds of unmasking requests at same time that the FBI was running a counterintelligence investigation against Trump's team, and his team's private communications were leaked to the press on numerous occasions.

Note the steps taken to legitimize the operation. The attempt was made to warm the people up to the fact that opposition research was used to secure a FISA warrant against a US president. First small leaks, then the entire dossier was leaked before the knowledge of the warrants came to light. The reaction was probably not what they were hoping for, as Buzzfeed and CNN were widely lambasted for a pee pee dossier unfit for tabloid publication. We also learned that John McCain delivered the dossier to the FBI, even though the FBI had been involved with it for months and already used it to secure a secret surveillance warrant. Whether McCain was in on the ruse or was just a convenient stooge is unclear (I'd lean to the latter), but what it did was to give the process legitimacy. Americans heard that a high-ranking Senator provided the FBI a research dossier from British intelligence, not that the FBI had used Hillary debate conspiracy theory, Democratic-funded opposition research, and a Yahoo News article to spy on Trump Tower.