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“Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened,” Durham said in a statement.
The Horowitz report was released Monday and it stated that investigators found no intentional misconduct or political bias over the efforts to start the 2016 probe and to seek a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to monitor Carter Page, the President's campaign adviser in the early part of the investigation. However, the report found that there were "significant concerns with how certain aspects of the investigation were conducted and supervised."
“I have the utmost respect for the mission of the Office of Inspector General and the comprehensive work that went into the report prepared by Mr. Horowitz and his staff,” Durham said. “However, our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department. Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.”
Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut has also been conducting a wider investigation into alleged misconduct and improper government surveillance on the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election. The Durham probe became a full criminal investigation publicly around October.
Attorney General William Barr appeared upset as he ripped the FBI over the investigation, calling it “intrusive” and saying it was launched based on the “thinnest of suspicions.”
“The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” Barr said in a statement.
He also expressed frustration that the FBI continued investigating the Trump campaign, even as “exculpatory” evidence came to the light.
“It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory,” Barr said. “Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump’s administration.”
Even former Special Counsel Robert Mueller acknowledged in his report that investigators did not find evidence of a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and the Russians in 2016 – which the FBI probed extensively.
So the Democrats obviously needed more dirt on Trump to keep the impeachment nonsense going.
Barr pointed out that the FISA report shows a “clear abuse” of the surveillance process, which has apparently been exemplified in Adam Schiff's using congressional subpoena power to go after phone records of GOP Congress members and a reporter.
“In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source,” Barr said factually.
He added, “The Inspector General found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory. While most of the misconduct identified by the Inspector General was committed in 2016 and 2017 by a small group of now-former FBI officials, the malfeasance and misfeasance detailed in the Inspector General’s report reflects a clear abuse of the FISA process.”
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