Comey: ‘Real sloppiness’ in Russia probe but no misconduct

WASHINGTON — Former FBI Director James Comey acknowledged Sunday that a Justice Department inspector general report identified “real sloppiness“in the surveillance of a former Trump campaign aide and said he was wrong to have been “overconfident“about how the Russia investigation was handled.

But Comey also insisted he was right to feel some measure of vindication because the report did not find evidence for the most sensational of President Donald Trump’s claims, including that he had been wiretapped and illegally spied on and that the FBI had committed treason in investigating ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign.

“Remember how we got here,“Comey said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “The FBI was accused of criminal misconduct. Remember, I was going to jail, and lots of other people were going to jail.“

The inspector general, he added, “did not find misconduct by FBI personnel, did not find political bias, did not find illegal conduct.“The significant mistakes the inspector general identified are “not something to sneeze at” but also not evidence of intentional misconduct, Comey said.

In a tweet Sunday, Trump called for an apology from Comey, now that he “got caught red handed.”

“So now Comey’s admitting he was wrong,” Trump wrote. “So what are the consequences for his unlawful conduct. Could it be years in jail? Where are the apologies to me and others, Jim?“

The report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that the FBI opened the Russia investigation for a legitimate reason and was not motivated by partisan bias when it did so. But Horowitz also found major errors and omissions in applications the FBI submitted to eavesdrop on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Those problems include the omission of key information about the reliability of a source whose information had been relied on for the warrant, and the altering of an email by an FBI lawyer.

Comey said in retrospect that he was wrong when he told an interviewer last year that the applications to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were handled in a “thoughtful, responsible way.“

Comey