GOP lawmakers grill Comey over Russia probe
Republican lawmakers on Wednesday confronted former FBI Director James Comey about his oversight of the Trump-Russia investigation during a politically charged hearing that focused attention on problems with a probe that have becoming a rallying cry for supporters of President Donald Trump.
Comey, making his first appearance before Congress since a harshly critical inspector general report on the investigation, repeatedly said he had been unaware of major problems with each of four applications the FBI submitted in 2016 to 2017 to eavesdrop on a former Trump campaign aide. He said he had been overly confident that the surveillance process was working as it should. He noted that the former campaign aide, Carter Page, accounted for just “a slice” of the investigation but that he wouldn’t have signed off on the surveillance had he known of the problems.
The questioning of Comey, conducted with the election just weeks away, underscores the extent to which the FBI’s investigation four years ago into potential co-ordination between Trump’s campaign and Russia remains front-andcentre in the minds of Republican lawmakers, who see an opening to rally support for the president and cast him as the victim of biased law enforcement.
Comey’s answers frustrated Republicans, who have seized on the FBI’s reliance on Democratic-funded research in applying to a secretive surveillance court for warrants to monitor Page on suspicion that he was a Russian agent. The inspector general report, and documents released in recent months, have raised significant questions about the reliability of that dossier of research.
The FBI nonetheless relied on that document “over and over and over” again even though it was “fundamentally unsound,” said the Judiciary Committee chairman, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a loyal Trump ally facing a tough re-election battle of South Carolina.
“What do we do — we just say that was bad, that’s the way it goes? Does anybody get fired? Does anybody go to jail?” Graham said, before turning to Democratic colleagues and saying, “If it happened to us, it can happen to you.”
Comey was fired by Trump in May 2017, but in the three and a half years since, he has remained a prominent and complicated character for Republicans and Democrats alike. Republicans have joined Trump in heaping scorn on Comey, but Democrats haven’t embraced him either, angered by his public statements made during the Hillary Clinton email case that they believe contributed to her loss.