A report released today by the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Justice (OIG) warns that the problems found with the FBI's secret warrants to wiretap former Donald Trump aide Carter Page were not an anomaly. The agency regularly makes mistakes on its applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment (FISA) Court when it asks for permission to secretly snoop on Americans.

Back in December, the OIG released a blockbuster report showing that FBI agents made a number of significant omissions and errors in their four warrant applications to snoop on Page in the hopes of determining if he was being unduly influenced by Russian officials during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz was so bothered by the problems with the Page warrants that he declared that the OIG would perform a deeper audit to see if FBI officials were following proper procedures with their other secret FISA warrants.

The results of that deeper audit were published today and they don't look good for the FBI. The OIG report shows that the agency regularly neglects proper procedures when seeking FISA warrants.

The failing point appears to be adherence to the Woods procedures, a collection of policies implemented in 2001 to make sure that every fact and detail in a warrant application to the FISA court has been carefully vetted for accuracy and to document that process. The FBI failed to properly follow those procedures with Page. Based on this new report, it looks like this failing is a common problem.