Former FBI Director James Comey admitted that he was “wrong” for being overconfident in his agency’s use of a surveillance process to obtain warrants to monitor a former member of President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The internal watchdog for the Justice Department, Michael Horowitz, testified last week about 17 “significant errors and omissions” in the FBI getting orders to monitor Carter Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
“He’s right, I was wrong,” Comey told “Fox News Sunday.”
“I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI and Justice had built over 20 years. I thought they were robust enough. It’s incredibly hard to get a FISA,” he said. “I was overconfident in those, because he’s right, there was real sloppiness.”
Fox host Chris Wallace also questioned Comey on his comments that Horowitz’s report vindicated him and the FBI in their handling of the investigation into Russian involvement in the election.
Wallace reminded Comey that Horowitz testified that the activities uncovered in his investigation “don’t vindicate anybody who touched this.”
“The FBI was accused of treason, of illegal spying of tapping Mr. Trump’s wires illegally, of opening an investigation without justification, of being a criminal conspiracy to defeat and then unseat a president,” Comey said. “All of that was nonsense.”
“But he also found things we were never accused of, which is real sloppiness, and that’s concerning as I’ve said all along has to be focused on as director,” Comey added.
The questioning turned testy when Wallace asked Comey about the integral role the “Steele dossier,” a report compiled by former British spy Christopher Steel for the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, played in getting the FISA warrants for Page and in subsequent renewals.
Comey downplayed its significance, saying it was “not a huge part of the presentation to the court.”
Wallace noted that Horowitz’s report concluded that the unsubstantiated information in the Steele dossier “played a central and essential role” in getting the federal judge to sign off on the warrant — even helping push the application “over the line” to establish probable cause.
The former G-Man said he failed to “see the disconnect” between his and Horowitz’s view of the dossier — even though he admitted that Steele’s reporting “convinced the lawyers” to move forward after initially being reluctant.
“I’m not sure he and I are saying different things,” Comey said. “What his report says is that the FBI thought it was a close call until they got the Steele report, put that additional information in and that tipped it over to be probable cause. It’s a long FISA application and includes Steele material and a lot of other things. I don’t think we’re saying different things.”
Fox’s Wallace also grilled Comey about the reliability of the information in the dossier.
In his report, Horowitz wrote that Steele’s Russian contact — a main source of information in the dossier — later told the FBI that Steele “misstated or exaggerated” the primary sub-source’s statements in sections of the reporting.
By then, Wallace said, the FBI knew the dossier was “bunk” but still used it to renew the Page FISA application three times.
Comey said he believed Wallace was “mischaracterizing what the FBI knew and what Mr. Horowitz says in his report.”
But Wallace said the source was saying about Steele, “I told him one thing, and he wrote something else” — and that the FBI was aware of that.
“But that doesn’t drive a conclusion that Steele’s reporting is bunk. I mean, there’s a number of tricky things to that,” he said. “First, you’re interviewing the sub-source after all of the reporting has become public. And so, as a counterintelligence investigator, you have to think, ‘Is he walking away from it because it’s now public,’ and that has to go into your assessment of Mr. Steele.”
Wallace then pressed Comey about how much interest he took in what the Russian contact said about Steele.
Comey said he’d let the Horowitz report “speak for itself” and added that the investigation was taking place several layers below him so he “didn’t know the particulars of the investigation.”
“But this isn’t some investigation, sir. This is an investigation of the campaign of the man who is the president of the United States,” Wallace said.
“You had just been through a firestorm investigating Hillary Clinton. I would think, if I were in your position, I would have been on that, you know, like a junkyard dog. I would have wanted to know everything they were doing in investigating the Trump campaign.”
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