Hours before the Fox News Sunday broadcast, Trump hurled further insults, tweeting: “Hard to believe that Fox News will be interviewing sleazebag [and] totally discredited former FBI Director James Comey”.
The Texas senator Ted Cruz added reinforcement, telling ABC’s This Week the IG report was “unbelievably damning of the Department of Justice and FBI. The abuse of power that occurred there is stunning.”
Neither the president nor the senator pointed out that two of the four Fisa applications were brought to the court by Trump’s own administration.
Page was an adviser on foreign affairs to the 2016 Trump campaign. In his Fox interview, Comey admitted Page had been “treated unfairly” in being subjected to wiretapping.
The most egregious aspect, he said, had been Page’s name being made public. “He is a United States citizen and it never should have been made public – that was an outrage.”
Horowitz pinpointed significant problems committed by three teams of FBI investigators. Two errors in particular stand out.The report highlights that the Fisa court was not told Page had contact with the CIA even after the FBI had become aware of that link, which would have
severely diluted any suspicion of wrongdoing on his part in his dealings with Russia. A justice department lawyer even altered an email to hide this crucial detail.
The report also criticizes the FBI for critically relying on the highly contentious Steele dossier, an investigation conducted as opposition research against Trump that was paid for initially by Trump’s Republican opponents and then by Democrats.
Horowitz found the Steele dossier had played a “central and essential” role in the Fisa application, despite having contained “misstated or exaggerated” intelligence.
