A US Justice Department inspection said it found numerous errors and omissions but no evidence of political bias by the FBI when the agency opened an investigation into contacts between members of Donald Trump's campaign team and Russia in 2016.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report is likely to provide ammunition to both Trump's supporters and his Democratic critics in the debate over the legitimacy of the investigation that has cast a shadow over his first two years in office, according to Reuters.
Trump, who called the FBI investigation a "witch hunt" on several occasions, said last night that Horovic's report showed that it was "an attempt to oust him and that a lot of people participated in it."
In March of last year, Horovic announced an investigation by the Ministry of Justice, and since then he has reviewed more than a million recordings and conducted over 1.000 interviews.
The inspection report attempts to assess whether the FBI had grounds for surveillance of Carter Page, a former adviser to Trump's campaign staff who lived and worked in Russia. The report concluded that the FBI used confidential informants in accordance with agency rules and without political bias, but said it did not meet standards when seeking authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor Page.
"The fact that so many fundamental and fundamental errors were made in four FISA applications by three different carefully selected teams in one of the FBI's most sensitive investigations ... raises significant questions about the FBI's chain of command and oversight of the FISA process," it said. report.
The inspection also challenges the way the FBI presented the work of former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, author of the so-called Steele dossier - a series of largely unsubstantiated allegations about Trump.
Steele was hired by a law firm on behalf of Trump's political opponents, including Hillary Clinton's campaign staff, to conduct research. The FBI relied heavily on Steele's research in the investigation.
Horowitz said in the report that the FBI "exaggerated the significance" of Steele's work when it said it was reliable. It also alleges that the FBI omitted relevant information about one of Steele's sources, whom Steele himself said was a "bragger" prone to "fraud." The inspector general's report, released on the same day as an impeachment hearing focused on Trump's actions in Ukraine, has drawn renewed attention to the legal and political investigations that have rocked the White House since Trump took office.
The investigation, eventually taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller after Trump fired James Comey as FBI director, began in July 2016 after the agency learned that former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos had publicly said Russia had compromising information. about Trump's opponent Hillary Clinton in the form of stolen emails.
Those emails, which were hacked by Russian intelligence operatives from Democratic email accounts, were published by WikiLeaks a few weeks before the election. Officials say it hurt Clinton's campaign and helped Trump's.
A few months later, the FBI sought and obtained a surveillance warrant for Page. Officials worried that the Russian government had recruited Page, although he has repeatedly denied this and was never charged.
US Attorney General William Barr issued a statement last night virtually ignoring the inspector general's main conclusion that there was enough evidence for the FBI to open an investigation into the Trump campaign.
"The inspector general's report now makes clear that the FBI opened an unjustified investigation into the US presidential campaign based solely on suspicion that, in my opinion, was insufficient to justify the steps taken," the Justice Department said in a statement.
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