“Somebody needs to be fired or go to jail,” over what happened in an FBI probe into the 2016 election campaign of US President Donald Trump, US Senator Lindsey Graham told the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington on Wednesday.
Senators were questioning former FBI director James Comey about his oversight of the probe, called Crossfire Hurricane, of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
The FBI relied on documentation “over and over and over” again even though it was “fundamentally unsound,” Graham said, referring to Democratic-funded research used in 2016 and 2017 to apply for warrants from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveil Carter Page, who was a Trump policy adviser at the time.
Page was not charged with any wrongdoing.
A report by US Department of Justice Inspector-General Michael Horowitz and documents released in recent months have raised questions about the reliability of the Democratic research.
In a letter to the committee on Tuesday, US National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe said that in late July 2016, US intelligence agencies obtained “insight” into Russian spycraft alleging that former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic nominee in 2016, had “approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against” Trump amid a separate FBI investigation into her use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state.
“What do we do? We just say: ‘Well, that was bad, that’s the way it goes?’ Does anybody get fired? Does anybody go to jail?” asked Graham, a Republican. “To my Democratic friends: If it happened to us, it can happen to you.”
Comey, making his first appearance before Congress since Horowitz’s report was released, said that the FBI’s process for conducting the surveillance on Page was “sloppy” and “embarrassing.”
He said he would not have certified the surveillance had he known then what he knows now about the applications the FBI submitted to the court.
In May 2017 Trump, as US president, fired Comey.
Democrat senators said that the hearing on Wednesday was backward-looking and that the FBI had good reason to investigate contacts between Trump associates and Russia.
The committee’s time could be better spent, they said.
“Most people think we should be talking about other things, except maybe President Trump,” US Senator Amy Klobuchar said.
Comey defended the probe, which examined multiple contacts between Russians and Trump associates during the 2016 campaign.
“In the main, it was done by the book. It was appropriate, and it was essential that it be done,” Comey said. “The overall investigation was very important. The Page slice of it? Far less given the scope.”
“I’m not looking to shirk responsibility,” Comey said. “The director is responsible.”
US Senator Ben Sasse said that Crossfire Hurricane was politically motivated.
“It appears that at the top of your organization there was a culture where many of the people who should have been doing the hard work to make sure the checks and balances were fully carried out didn’t think there was really any chance they would get caught, and so they could be sloppy to malicious,” Sasse said.
Senators also challenged Comey with information released last week by US Attorney General William Barr.
Barr told Graham in a letter that a primary source for a dossier about Trump, which the Clinton campaign funded, was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011.
Comey said that was not an issue he recalled being briefed on.
He pushed back on Barr’s repeated criticism of the Russia probe, saying that he was “mystified” why the attorney general would not see how the bulk of the evidence coming before the bureau in 2016 and 2017 would not merit further examination.
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