Today during a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) questioned Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz about his report detailing widespread FISA application abuse by the FBI during its 2016 counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign. Under questioning from Senator Hawley, IG Horowitz left the door open to the possibility that bias against the Trump campaign played a role in the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation.
Sen. Hawley: “Was it your conclusion that political bias did not affect any part of the Page investigation, any part of Crossfire Hurricane?”
IG Horowitz: “We did not reach that conclusion.”
Sen. Hawley: “Because I could have sworn, in fact, I know for a fact that I’ve heard that today from this committee. That’s not your conclusion?”
IG Horowitz: “We have been very careful in the connection with the FISA’s for the reasons you mentioned to not reach that conclusion in part – as we’ve talked about earlier – the alteration of the email, the text messages associated with the individual who did that, and our inability to explain or understand, to get good explanations so that we could understand why this all happened.”
Sen. Hawley: “I think we’re left with two possibilities here. You have three different investigative teams as you testified earlier, you’ve got a dozen people at the FBI, you’ve got the decisions made over time to mislead the FISA court. Either these people were really incompetent and bad at their jobs or they had an agenda that they were pursuing. And having an agenda – I don’t care what word you put in front of it – political agenda, personal agenda, but whatever it is, it is antithetical to democracy.”