Breaking: DOJ Going After FISA Abuse That Targeted Trump Campaign
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Tuesday that the Department of Justice inspector general will be investigating the agency’s use of the FISA court to obtain a spy warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
“We believe the Department of Justice must adhere to the highest standards in the FISA court, and yes it will be investigated, and I think that’s just the appropriate thing, the Inspector General will take that as one of the matters he’ll deal with,” Sessions told reporters at a briefing Tuesday.
House Republicans have alleged that the DOJ and FBI provided inaccurate and incomplete information in four applications for FISA warrants against Page.
They say that the applications relied heavily on the dossier but failed to disclose that the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee funded the unverified document.
Democrats have countered by pointing out that the FISA applications disclosed the FBI “speculated” that the dossier was paid for by a politically motivated client.
Page, an energy consultant, was under surveillance from Oct. 21, 2016, through September 2017.
Sessions has previously indicated that the Justice Department planned to investigate potential FISA abuses, but he did not say that the matter would be handled by the office of the inspector general, which is led by Michael Horowitz.
“Let me tell you, every FISA warrant based on facts submitted to that court have to be accurate,” Sessions told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo in an interview earlier in February.
“That will be investigated and looked at, and we are not going to participate as a Department of Justice in providing anything less than a proper disclosure to the court before they issue a FISA warrant. Other than that, I’m not going to talk about the details of it, but I tell you, we’re not going to let that happen,” he said.
Horowitz is already conducting an investigation into the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation.
So far, that probe has uncovered politically charged text message exchanges between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page.
Strzok and Page both worked on the Clinton investigation as well as the Russia probe.
Strzok was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in July after Horowitz discovered the text messages.
The inspector general’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.
A version of this article appeared on The Daily Caller News Foundation website.
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