On Tuesday, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell made it clear that the GOP-led Senate would indeed pursue an investigation into the alleged abuses committed by federal officials during the Obama administration, asserting, “The American people deserve answers about how such abuses could happen and we intend to get those answers.”
McConnell referenced the FISA warrant calling for surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page:
Does any senator think it’s acceptable for any federal warrant application to include seven significant inaccuracies and omissions? This wasn’t just a run-of-the–mill warrant; it was a FISA warrant to snoop on a presidential campaign. This is just one of the realities that President Trump’s Democratic critics spent years calling “conspiracy theories” or “inventions of the president’s mind.”
Those seven inaccuracies and omissions included, as The Heritage Foundation delineated:
- The FBI failed to inform the FISA court that it had been notified by another government agency that Page had provided information to that agency and the FBI about some of his contacts with Russian intelligence agents and had approval of “operational contact.”
- Stating that Christopher Steele’s prior reporting had been “corroborated and used in criminal proceedings.”
- Eliding the fact that although Steele claimed that critical information he was reporting about Page from a “sub-source,” Steele also described this source as a “boaster” and an “egoist” who “may engage in some embellishment.”
- Fourth, as the Heritage Foundation wrote, “To bolster Steele’s credibility, the FISA application stated that some of the information that Steele reported had appeared in an article in Yahoo News, and that Steele was not the source for that story. This implied that somebody else had the same information Steele had and could serve as independent corroboration. However, it turns out that Steele was the source for that story, and that the FBI either knew it or easily could have learned it.”
- The FISA application did not acknowledge that George Papadopoulos explicitly denied that anyone from with the Trump campaign was collaborating with the Russians or anyone else about the disclosed DNC emails.
- The FBI elided the fact that Page said that he never had met or spoken to Paul Manafort and that Manafort had not responded to any of his emails.
- That Page denied meeting the Russians Igor Sechin and Igor Nikolayevich Divyekin, and denied even knowing who Divyekin was.
McConnell continued:
Yet here it is, in black and white, from exactly the kind of independent Inspector General that Democrats rush to embrace when convenient. Sadly, this was no isolated incident. Just recently, Attorney General Barr has had to take the incredible step of unwinding a DOJ prosecution of another former Trump advisor because the government’s case against him was unfair or distorted as well. It was largely on the basis of these proceedings that Democrats and the media spent years fixating on wild theories of Russian collusion.
But upon investigation, the Mueller investigation — remember that one?— it is those wild allegations that collapsed along with the credibility of several of these investigations that helped create the cloud of suspicion in the first place …
As if this debacle needed even more shocking behavior, I understand a federal judge may try to continue prosecuting one of these cases even though the prosecution itself wants to drop it. The judge has taken it upon himself to go browsing for other hostile parties. Obviously, that’s subverts our Constitutional order in which the executive alone decides whether to prosecute cases …
No matter what some Washington Democrats may try to claim, you’re not crazy or a conspiracy theorist if you see a pattern of institutional unfairness toward this president. You would have to be blind not to see one. You would have to be blind not to see one. All of this is why the Senate passed important FISA reforms in last week’s bill to help bring accountability and transparency into that flawed process, and we aren’t nearly finished.
Just yesterday Chairman (Lindsey) Graham announced the Judiciary Committee will vote on a serious new set of subpoenas so the Senate can hear directly from key players like James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Loretta Lynch, and many others to continue getting to the bottom of this.
So let me say that again: Senate Republicans are taking steps to issue new subpoenas to a wide variety of Obama Administration officials with some relationship to the abuses I’ve laid out. The American people deserve answers about how such abuses could happen and we intend to get those answers.
Video below:
#BREAKING: Sen. Mitch McConnell: "Senate Republicans are taking steps to issue new subpoenas to a wide variety of Obama Administration officials." https://t.co/61CZraQnBb pic.twitter.com/BS8mEP9NCo
— The Hill (@thehill) May 19, 2020
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