Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz’s report suggests that the FBI “fell far short” and made “serious” errors in obtaining the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications to surveil the Trump campaign.
The report on alleged FBI misconduct during its surveillance of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign found that the FBI made serious errors in obtaining the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications.
The investigation found: “We concluded that the failures described above and in this report represent serious performance failures by the supervisory and non-supervisory agents with responsibility for the FISA applications.”
“These failures prevented [Office of Intelligence (OI)] from fully performing its gatekeeper function and deprived the decision-makers the opportunity to make fully informed decisions.
Although some of the factual misstatements and omissions we found in this review were arguably more significant than others, we believe that all of them taken together resulted in FISA applications that made it appear that the information supporting the probable cause was stronger than was actually the case.”
The report states that it identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications, and many additional errors in the Woods Procedures. These errors and omissions resulted from case agents providing wrong or incomplete information to OI and failing to flag important issues for discussion.
It also states that the FBI “did not have information corroborating the specific allegations against Carter Page in Steele’s reports when it relied upon them in the FISA applications.”
The report also found that “as the interagency editing process for the [Intelligence Community Assessment] progressed, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) expressed concern about the lack of vetting for the Steele election reporting and asserted it did not merit inclusion in the body of the report.
An FBI Intel Section Chief told us the CIA viewed it as ‘internet rumor.’”
[rumble video_id=v58b6v domain_id=u7nb2]