Rep. Adam Schiff acknowledged the mistakes made by FBI officials as they applied for federal warrants to surveil members of President Trump’s 2016 campaign after defending the counterintelligence inquiry for months.
“I’m certainly willing to admit that the inspector general found serious abuses of FISA that I was unaware of,” Schiff said on Fox News Sunday.
Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz found more than a dozen examples of information top law enforcement officials failed to share or misrepresented with the court when seeking a warrant to investigate whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election. He also found, however, that no political bias against Trump motivated the effort.
Schiff, who for months has defended the FBI, said his previous statements regarding the legitimacy of the FBI investigation that culminated with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report were made given the facts he had at the time.
“I think it’s only fair to judge what we knew at the time, not what would be revealed two years later,” Schiff said. “But yes, there were very serious abuses of the FISA process. They need to be corrected. We need to make sure they never happen again.”
