In yet another adversarial moment with the U.S. intelligence community, Trump cast the report and memo as a "tremendous blot" on the record of intelligence agencies.
Senator Leahy is right, particularly given that the intelligence court has no adversarial process and is at the mercy of the government's competence at ferreting out its own incompetence.
It is no secret they can also be used to gather intelligence and pass it to adversarial sources.
The written decisions of an internal national security court, in contrast, would be products of an adversarial system (unlike the FISA Court), and later reviewed by Congressional intelligence committees.
Nonetheless, he said, it would be "entirely appropriate" to build in an adversarial process if that were the best way to ensure intelligence agencies complied with the law.
Federal courts have ample discretion to keep sensitive intelligence under seal, while still affording defendants a legitimate adversarial process.
Obama and some intelligence officials have publicly signaled support for creating an adversarial legal process in the court, which now hears only from government lawyers, and aides have suggested the president will create an advocate's position or call for legislation to do so in a speech scheduled for Friday morning at the Justice Department.
Instead, it will embolden elements within Pakistan's military-intelligence complex to act in ways that will be adversarial to Pakistan's democracy – and India's security.
He adds that we should allow adversarial pre-warrant proceedings in FISA courts and be more transparent to congressional intelligence committees but also concludes that Snowden put American lives at risk and hurt our relations with allies.
At the backdrop of Israeli fears that Turkey could become an adversarial power, the Jewish state has sought to leverage its apparent economic success to spearhead defense and intelligence cooperation with the Balkan states.
