The report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz indicates Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and fired FBI Director James Comey, among others, made false claims in their defense of the Obama administration’s effort to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016.
But establishment media also have been caught in lies now, said Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night, calling the IG report “a disaster for the credibility of our bureaucratic class in Washington” and “a big, big problem for the American news media.”
He cited statements from CNN’s Evan Perez, Shimon Prokupecz and James Clapper.
Perez said: “You know, a lot of people will focus on the dossier. A lot of people will focus on a FISA of Carter Page, and they’ll say, ‘They were spying on a campaign.’ But at the beginning, this is all about what Russia was doing.”
Prokupecz declared: “And now Republicans were trying to claim that the dossier was key to getting the FISA, this surveillance warrant for Carter Page. But the Democrats’ memo clearly shows that it wasn’t the key, that there was more to the information that they had.”
And Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, said:
“Even the earlier version of the redacted FISA authorization, to me, had enough information in it to indicate that the dossier was certainly not used as the primary source.”
Carlson commented: “Everything you just read turned out to be false, if not outright lying. There’s no debate about it. We know now it was wrong.”
He noted the Horowitz report confirms “the Steele dossier played a central role in the genesis of the beginning of the Russia hoax.”
It was used, he said, “to justify extensive spying on an innocent American citizen; that would be former naval officer and Annapolis graduate, Carter Page.”
“The top two leaders at the FBI were closely involved in the decision to do this. Other powerful people, including a former director of the CIA, knew it was happening and then lied to cover it up later. All of that was confirmed Monday by the IG’s report.”
He also noted statements by the Washington Post and NBC News have been discredited by the IG report.
WND reported Horowitz confirmed the contention by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., that the Steele dossier was essential to the Obama administration’s obtaining search warrants.
It also verified many other assertions by Nunes and his staff, including that the FBI did not reveal to the FISA court that the dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Further, the IG report released Monday, notes the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway, shows seven major points in Schiff’s memo countering Nunes to be false.
Schiff, now the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, falsely claimed:
- FBI and DOJ officials did not omit material information from the FISA warrant.
- The DOJ “made only narrow use of information from Steele’s sources about Page’s specific activities in 2016.”
- In subsequent FISA renewals, DOJ provided additional information that corroborated Steele’s reporting.
- The Page FISA warrant allowed the FBI to collect “valuable intelligence.”
- “Far from ‘omitting’ material facts about Steele, as the Majority claims, DOJ repeatedly informed the Court about Steele’s background, credibility, and potential bias.”
- The FBI conducted a “rigorous process” to vet Steele’s allegations, and the Page FISA application explained the FBI’s reasonable basis for finding Steele credible.
- Steele’s prior reporting was used in “criminal proceedings.”
Horowitz concluded Obama officials not only omitted critical material information from the FISA warrant, they willfully doctored evidence.
And he found that Comey was briefed on concerns that the document presented as primary evidence to obtain warrants to surveil the Trump campaign was funded by the Democratic Party, contrary to Comey’s claim in a Fox News interview.
In an April 2018 interview with Bret Baier, the “Special Report” host asked Comey when he learned that the so-called Steele dossier was funded by the Democratic National Convention and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
“Yeah, I still don’t know that for a fact,” Comey said.
“What do you mean?” Baier asked.
“I’ve only seen it in the media. I never knew exactly which Democrats has funded — I knew it was funded first by Republicans,” Comey responded.
“That’s not true that the dossier that Christopher Steele worked on was funded by Republicans,” Baier said.
The IG report states that both Comey and then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe were in an Oct. 12, 2016, meeting in which then-National Security Division Assistant Attorney General Stuart Evans raised concerns about the DNC and Clinton campaign funding the Steele dossier.
The Horowitz report states:
On October 12, 2016, Evans’s concerns about Steele were briefed to Comey and McCabe in a meeting attended by at least [E.W] Priestap, [Peter] Strzok, Lisa Page, and the OGC unit Chief. According to notes of the meeting, the group discussed that Evans was concerned Steele may have been hired by someone associated with Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and that the read copy of the FISA application would not be filed with the court that day so that Evans could further assess the potential bias. …
Following the meeting, the OGC Unit Chief emailed [Deputy General Counsel Trisha] Anderson and and the OGC Attorney on October 12 and advised them that the concerns Evans had raised were discussed with Comey and McCabe.
