{Strikes my irony that a secret court has a web page...}
A 2013 letter from the Chief Judge to Leaky Leahy has the rules and a plain language exposition of the process:
http://www.fisc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/Leahy.pdf
“...In some cases, the government may decide not to submit a final application, or to withdraw one that has been submitted, after learning that the judge does not intend to approve it. The annual statistics provided to Congress by the Attorney General pursuant to 50 U.S.C. §§ 1807 and 1862(b)-frequently cited to in press reports as a suggestion that the Court’s approval rate of applications is over 99% - reflect only the number of final applications submitted to and acted on by the Court. These statistics do not reflect the fact that many applications are altered prior to final submission or even withheld from fmal submission entirely, often after an indication that a judge would not approve them.6
...6 Notably, the approval rate for Title III wiretap applications (see note 2 above) is higher than the approval rate for FISA applications, even using the Attorney General’s FISA statistics as the baseline for comparison”
Striking that though the FISA rejection rate is minuscule, the ‘regular’ wiretap rejection rate is even smaller.
Everyone has something to bring.