Senate

Conservatives rip FBI over IG report: ‘scathing indictment’

by Jordain Carney

Republican senators tore into the Obama-era FBI and Justice Department (DOJ) on Wednesday, calling a report from a DOJ watchdog a “scathing indictment” of the FBI. 
 
GOP senators, in back-to-back statements, hammered the FBI over DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s findings on surveillance of Trump campaign associates during the 2016 election. 
 

“This report is a scathing indictment of the FBI, of the agents that were involved,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. 

 

Lee specifically called out former FBI Director James Comey, who had responded to the report in a Washington Post op-ed, saying that it disproved declarations from President Trump and his allies that the FBI “spied” on the Trump campaign and engaged in wrongdoing.

 

“There is no planet on which I think this report indicates that things were OK within the FBI in connection with this investigation … and yet stunningly former FBI Director Jim Comey took to the pages of The Washington Post to declare that this report, your report, shows that the FBI fulfilled its mission,” Lee said. 

 

“I don’t understand that. I find it absolutely stunning that he would reach that conclusion. This is nonsense,” he continued.

Horowitz’s report, released Monday, found that the FBI’s decision to open a probe into Trump campaign associates was not motivated by political bias. 

Still, the watchdog found “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the FBI’s application to the secretive court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as part of its efforts to monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) noted that senators were “beating up on the FBI, I think appropriately so to some point.”  
 
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said that the report laid out “a stunning indictment of the FBI and the Department of Justice, of a pattern of abuse of power.” 
 
“I think the facts that are in this report need to be understood and they should be deeply chilling to anyone who understands the facts,” Cruz said.

Cruz added that if someone within the FBI or Justice Department had tried to open an investigation into a rival presidential campaign when he was working for DOJ someone would have asked “what in the hell are we doing?”

“When I was at DOJ if someone said let’s tap Hillary Clinton, or let’s tap Bill Clinton or John Kerry the people would have said what in the hell are you talking about? This wasn’t Jason Bourne. This was Beavis and Butthead,” Cruz continued.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who questioned Horowitz after Cruz, started her questioning by saying she wanted to “tone things down a little bit here.”