Comey defends Russia inquiry
Former FBI director James Comey testified Wednesday before a Republicanled Senate committee seeking to discredit the investigation he opened during the 2016 election into ties between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.
With another presidential election looming, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee were eager to portray Trump as a victim of a politically motivated smear by the FBI that unfairly cast a shadow over his presidency. And they contended that Comey was the ringleader.
Comey strongly defended the FBI’S handling of the investigation, including his decision to open it. But he acknowledged, as he has before, that his initial claims were wrong that a wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, was properly handled and conceded that the bureau had been sloppy on that aspect of the broader inquiry.
He testified by video from his home.
Comey remains a centerpiece of a monthslong attempt by conservatives to rewrite the TrumpRussia narrative
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Judiciary Committee chairman, renewed his criticism of the FBI’S investigation of ties between Russian election interference and the Trump campaign.
The panel has for months pounded away at the inquiry, building its work on an investigation by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, that found evidence of negligence and errors in one narrow aspect of the investigation: the FBI’S applications to wiretap Page. But where the inspector general concluded there was no evidence of illegal activity or a politically motivated plot by senior department officials, Graham insists there may have been.
Comey signed off on some of the certifications for the warrant applications and, as director, was the top bureau official responsible for the investigation until he was fired by Trump in the spring of 2017.
But in an opening statement, Graham more narrowly trained his focus on the secret wiretap warrants and made nary a mention of Comey.
“I’m saying this to my Democratic friends: If it happened to us, it could happen to you. Every American should be worried about this,” Graham said. “This is not just an abuse of power against Mr. Page and the Trump campaign. This is a system failure.”
The committee has already publicly questioned two former deputy attorneys general, Rod Rosenstein and Sally Yates, who oversaw the Russia investigation and signed off on the applications for the secret wiretap warrants targeting Page. Both expressed regret for errors identified by Horowitz but dismissed assertions by Republicans on the panel that their actions were politically motivated or that Trump’s campaign need not have been investigated.
Democrats have opposed Graham at every turn, accusing him of abusing his Senate powers to help Trump and take attention from the continuing Russian threat. On Wednesday, they said he was unfairly trying to discredit the entire investigation based on one small aspect of it, a dossier of unverified information compiled by a British former spy, Christopher Steele, that investigators relied in part on to secure court permission for the Page wiretaps.