After a nearly two-year investigation, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s highly anticipated report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse by the Justice Department and FBI during the Trump-Russia investigation was released on Monday.
Horowitz started looking into alleged FISA abuse in March 2018, and Attorney General William Barr — along with U.S. Attorney John Durham — launched his own broader inquiry earlier this year into the origins of and the actions taken during the Trump-Russia investigation, dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane,” carried out by the Justice Department and FBI.
The 412 pages of redacted FISA documents released in 2018 showed that the Justice Department and FBI made extensive use of an unverified dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele, which made a series of salacious allegations regarding Trump and Russia. The dossier was used to obtain four surveillance warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page in 2016 and 2017.
Steele put his research together in 2016 at the behest of Fusion GPS, which had been hired by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The Clinton campaign hired the firm through Marc Elias of the Perkins Coie law firm, and it was briefed about Steele’s findings during the race. Neither Steele receiving funding from a Democratic presidential campaign, nor the known flaws with his dossier, nor his strong desired to see Trump defeated were revealed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The FISA applications targeting Page required the approval of top members of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the FISA Court, and those who signed off on it included former FBI Director Comey; former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates; Dana Boente, the only signatory in active government service, currently Trump’s top lawyer at the FBI; then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe; and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Horowitz’s bombshell report sheds light on all of their actions.
