Conservative commentator Sean Hannity said on his Fox News program Wednesday night that his sources say the Justice Department inspector general’s investigation into abuse by the FBI of FISA warrants to surveil the Trump campaign is “done” — and “it’s devastating.” The conservative host’s comments come a few days after it was revealed that Attorney General William Barr has appointed Connecticut’s top prosecutor John Durham to investigate the increasingly suspicious origins of the Trump-Russia probe amid new troubling revelations.
In comments reported by the Washington Examiner, Hannity first brought up Inspector General Michael Horowitiz’s FISA abuse probe in a discussion with Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett and Fox contributor former Rep. Jason Chaffetz. “I have sources telling me that Horowitz perhaps is even finished with his report and certainly [Attorney General William Barr] has been briefed on what is coming,” said Hannity.
Hannity noted that former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova told Fox Business last week that Horowitz “has concluded that the final three FISA extensions were illegally obtained” and that new disclosures from an open-records request indicate that “all four FISAs will have been obtained illegally.”
Later in the program, while speaking with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham — a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is conducting its own investigation into the 2016 FISA applications — Hannity again brought up what his sources tell him about the inspector general’s investigation.
We’ve learned that the FBI were forewarned that the dossier was “unverified,” that “Hillary paid for it,” and that its author, Christopher Steele, “hated Trump,” said Hannity. “Also, now we have the emails before the first [FISA] application went in,” he said, referencing newly unearthed records.
“It sounds like a premeditated conspiracy to commit fraud on a FISA court,” said Hannity, adding, “And I’m also hearing Horowitz is done, and it’s devastating.”
The host then asked Graham what he’s heard about the status of the inspector general’s probe.
“I can’t verify if Horowitz is done, I can’t tell you what he found, but I can tell you that if you care about the rule of law, you’re going to be very upset about how the DOJ and the FBI behaved themselves during the 2016 election,” said Graham. “If you hate Trump, you won’t care. If you love the rule of law, you’ll be very upset.”
Video of the exchange with Graham below via Fox News (relevant comments begin around the 4′ mark):
In an interview on Yahoo News’ “Skullduggery” podcast released earlier Wednesday, former FBI general counsel James Baker defended the FBI’s use of the unverified, Democrat-funded Steele dossier to obtain FISA warrants, but made a comment that turned some heads. While the FBI took the partisan dossier “seriously,” he said, the bureau “didn’t necessarily take it literally,” suggesting they had been suspicious of its credibility from the beginning. Asked by hosts Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman what the FBI did in an attempt to confirm the claims in the dossier, Baker refused to give specifics, saying instead that they created an “investigative plan” to verify it — a plan that ultimately failed as the salacious, Democrat-funded dossier that helped start the “collusion” narrative remains “unverified” to this day.