NBC News justice correspondent Pete Williams sounded off on FBI officials after the release of the Justice Department inspector general’s report on alleged Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse by the DOJ.
In his highly anticipated report, Michael Horowitz identified 17 instances in which top DOJ and FBI officials made “significant errors or omissions” in the FISA applications to surveil onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. He concluded, however, that political bias did not contribute to the opening of the 2016 investigation into allegations of collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russia.
“The FBI failed to document to the court assertions in the FISA application that undercut [Christopher] Steele’s credibility,” Williams noted on Monday after the release. “Even though the FBI got information that would raise questions about the credibility of Steele, it failed to reassess its own reliance on him, failed to tell the [FISA] court about these problems, and didn’t press him on the source of his information.”
“Nonetheless, it says it found no political bias in seeking the FISA warrant on Page,” he continued. “What this is, is the FBI basically repeatedly screwed up at every level, failing to pay enough attention to potential problems with Steele, failing to tell the Justice Department. And it says at one point that the FBI decided to seek this FISA warrant, even at the risk of being criticized for doing it later, because the report says, FBI officials said they had to get to the bottom of a potentially serious threat to national security. But the inspector general report says the FISA application was in many ways inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported. It says, for example, that the FBI failed to look at some of the problems in Steele’s past work, but that was never sufficiently addressed.”
He noted that the inspector general “is so concerned about these problems” that he is “now opening a new investigation into how the FBI gets these FISA warrants on American citizens.”
Following the release of the report, Trump slammed the Russia investigation, calling it a “disgrace” and “an overthrow of government.” He added that he is looking forward to an upcoming report from U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is conducting a separate investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation. Durham issued a statement Monday in which he disagreed with the inspector general’s determination that the opening of the Trump-Russia investigation was justified.
