President Trump’s legal team used the Senate impeachment trial as a platform to chide Democrats for casting aspersions on allegations of surveillance abuse against the 2016 Trump campaign.
Jay Sekulow, an attorney on Trump’s defense team, took an indirect swipe at House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, the lead impeachment manager who was in the Senate chamber on Tuesday, for his defense of wiretapping of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, an American citizen who was suspected of being a Russian agent but was never charged with wrongdoing.
“Managers at this table right here said that any discussions on the abuse from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act utilized to get the warrants from the court were ‘conspiracy theories,'” Sekulow said.
Claiming that Trump was under “attack,” Sekulow cited the secret surveillance court’s acknowledgment in a recent court filing that the Justice Department found at least two of the FISA orders targeting Page in 2017 were insufficiently predicated.
In early 2018, Schiff called a memo prepared by the then-Republican majority of the House Intelligence Committee outlining allegations of FISA abuse against the Trump campaign a “conspiracy theory” that suggested “a cabal of senior officials within the FBI and the Justice Department were so tainted by bias against President Trump that they irredeemably poisoned the investigation.”
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz investigated the allegations and released a report last month. While he determined the genesis of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign was not tainted by bias, the independent watchdog did fault the Justice Department and the FBI for 17 “significant errors and omissions” during the Page FISA application process and for relying on British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s salacious and unverified dossier. He also could not say whether bias tainted that FISA process.
Horowitz issued at least one criminal referral to the Justice Department regarding an FBI lawyer identified as Kevin Clinesmith for allegedly altering a document related to the surveillance of Page. U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is conducting a review of the FBI’s Russia investigation, is exploring whether a crime was committed by Clinesmith.
Sekulow, who is defending Trump against articles of impeachment charging him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, also defended the president’s desire to investigate efforts by Democrats to hurt his 2016 presidential campaign by raising the unverified Steele dossier, which was used by the FBI to obtain the FISA warrants.
“You can’t view this case in a vacuum,” Sekulow argued. “Put yourselves in his shoes.”
