Soon after Monday’s release of the 476-page inspector general’s report on the Carter Page FISA applications and aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, former FBI Director James Comey took to Twitter to promote his op-ed in the Washington Post.
“So it was all lies. No treason. No spying on the campaign. No tapping Trumps [sic] wires. It was just good people trying to protect America,” Comey tweeted, with a link to his opinion article that demanded “those who attacked the FBI for two years should admit they were wrong.”
Comey’s spin is laughable. And there will be time in the days and weeks ahead to highlight the many failures of the DOJ and FBI revealed in the minutia of IG Michael Horowitz’s report. For now, though, let’s focus on a different detail exposed by Horowitz’s investigation into Crossfire Hurricane—that Comey falsely testified that the FBI had not launched an investigation into the Trump campaign.
Comey made that claim just more than a year ago, when he testified before the House Judiciary and Government Reform and Oversight committees. During that December 2018 hearing, Rep. Trey Gowdy posed this question to Comey: “Late July of 2016, the FBI did, in fact, open a counterintelligence investigation into, is it fair to say the Trump campaign or Donald Trump himself?”
“It’s not fair to say either of those things, in my recollection,” Comey retorted. “We opened investigations on four Americans to see if there was any connection between those four Americans and the Russian interference efforts. And those four Americans did not include the candidate.”
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