President Donald Trump renewed his complaint Monday that a cabal of rogue FBI officials had tried to engineer an ‘overthrow’ when they obtained a series of surveillance warrants against one of his 2016 campaign advisers.<\/p>\n
The agency ignored warnings that an anti-Trump research dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele was flawed\u2014and its author biased\u2014when agents used the material to justify warrants targeting Carter Page, who they thought might be a Russian asset.<\/p>\n
That assessment came from a blockbuster issued by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, spelling out steps the feds failed to take when they learned Steele’s work was funded by the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign.<\/p>\n
‘This was an overthrow of government. This was an attempted overthrow and a lot of people were in on it, and they got caught,’ Trump told reporters in the hour after the report’s publlic release. ‘They got caught red-handed.’<\/p>\n
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Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz has released his report on the opening of the ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ Russia probe<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
‘They fabricated evidence and they lied to the courts,’ he claimed, calling the report’s conclusions ‘an incredible thing that happened and we’re lucky we caught them.’<\/p>\n
Trump seemed to take credit for firing FBI Director James Comey in 2017, suggesting that he had quelled an illegal conspiracy by putting its leader out of commission.<\/p>\n
Trump warned about ‘what they would have done if I didn’t make a certain move, a certain move that was a very important move because it would have been even worse if that’s possible. ‘And it might have been able to succeed.’<\/p>\n
The FBI’s decision to target Page with spying authorized by a secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court was made and reinforced by the FBI’s most senior leaders, Horowitz wrote.<\/p>\n
‘[T]he FBI’s decision to rely upon Steele’s election reporting to help establish probable cause that Page was an agent of Russia was a judgment reached initially by the case agents on the Crossfire Hurricane team,’ he explained, referring to the name of the operation.<\/p>\n
‘We further determined that FBI officials at every level concurred with this judgment, from the … attorneys assigned to the investigation to senior [counterintelligence] officials, then General Counsel James Baker, then Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and then Director James Comey.’<\/p>\n
Even after the senior Justice Department official in charge of national security cautioned that Steele’s work product might be a political hit job aimed at Trump, Comey and his chain of command never re-evaluated their position, Horowitz wrote.<\/p>\n
‘FBI leadership supported relying on Steele’s reporting to seek a FISA order on Page after being advised of, and giving consideration to, concerns expressed by Stuart Evans, then NSD’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General with oversight responsibility over [intelligence], that Steele may have been hired by someone associated with presidential candidate Clinton or the DNC.’<\/p>\n
As FBI officials learned more and more about Steele, his ‘reliability,’ and his funding, Horowitz wrote, they never took a fresh look at what they were submitting to FISA judges.<\/p>\n
‘[T]he FBI failed to reassess the Steele reporting relied upon in the FISA applications … [and] did not press Steele for information about the actual funding source for his election reporting work,’ the report says.<\/p>\n
At an event Monday about education reform, the president called the episode ‘a disgrace.’<\/p>\n
‘It’s incredible, far worse than what I ever thought possible,’ he said, referring to ‘concocted’ FISA warrant applications.<\/p>\n
‘It’s an embarrassment to our country. It’s dishonest. It’s everything that a lot of people thought it would be, except much worse.’<\/p>\n
Continue reading at: https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-7771985\/Donald-Trump-slams-FBI-getting-spy-warrants-aides.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ‘This was an attempted overthrow and a lot of people were in on it, and they got caught!’ Donald Trump blasts FBI for using Russia dossier to get spy warrants on campaign aide despite KNOWING author Christopher Steele was biased … Continue reading