It's highly likely,Fusion GPS and Crowdstrike, the DNCs private security firm,
were among the redacted contractors of the FBI.
Read this:
Five Things Everyone Is Ignoring About The Ru | The Daily Caller
The courts decision (link below) reveals that the upper echelon of the FBI (such as James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and others( deliberately gave unlimited and unsupervised access to the most private raw FISA data to a private contractor. (Can you say Fusion GPS and CrowdStrike?)
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/icotr/51117/2016_Cert_FISC_Memo_Opin_Order_Apr_2017.pdf
Now, lotta homework here...which mainstream media doesnt cover.
How do we know there was really a problem in the FBI and the DOJ? Read the unclassified decision (above link) of the special super-secret FISA Court especially beginning at page 83. The FISA Court oversees our spy agencies and the massive data collection operations of our federal government. It operates in utmost secrecy too much secrecy.
The unclassified FISA court decision reveals major violations by the FBI. The FBI gave private contractors illegal access to the all of the raw data collected by the NSA. The Court noted an institutional lack of candor on NSAs part and emphasized that this is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.
Apparently, the saga for the court began on March 9, 2016, when DOJ oversight personnel conducting a minimization review of the FBIs *** [redacted] learned that the FBI had disclosed raw FISA information, including but not limited to Section 702-acquired information.
Reading between the redactions, that disclosure involved an entity largely staffed by private contractors.
On top of that, certain *** [redacted] contractors had access to raw FISA information on FBI storage systems. ***[redacted] the ***[redacted] contractors had access to raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to the FBIs requests.
According to the Court, the FBI discontinued the above-described access to raw FISA information as of April 18, 2016.
The court continued, noting
Restrictions were not in place with regard to the *** [redacted] contractors; their access was not limited to raw information for which the FBI sought assistance and access continued even after they had completed their work in response to an FBI request.
The court catalogues a separate violation by the FBI, but most of it is redacted. Footnote 68 of the Courts decision includes the statement that the government acknowledges that those disclosures were improper for other reasons.
It gets worse. The court wrote in Footnote 69 that improper access granted to the * * *[redacted] contractors . . . * * *[redacted] . . . seems to have been the result of deliberate decision-making. * * *[redacted] access to FBI systems was the subject of an interagency memorandum of understanding (presumably prepared or reviewed by FBI lawyers), no notice of this practice was given to the FISC until 2016.
NSA Director Admiral Michal S. Rogers, whom James Clapper and others sought to have fired, deserves credit for reporting these problems to the FISA court and for stopping the use of the certain queries which facilitated the abuses of the intelligence systems.