A former campaign adviser to Donald Trump said—amid news of an FBI official being probed for altering a document used to get surveillance approved on him—that the bureau has been falsifying documents for years.
Carter Page, who was surveilled during the 2016 election, said that the latest report “is more of the same.”
“They have been falsifying documents and providing false testimony in courts of law for years now. Just last year, in my one case, on Jan. 30, 2018, the Southern District of New York put a false pleading—misleading the court about abuse of process in the FISA abuse—and then two days later, then-Chairman Devin Nunes of House Intelligence totally proved them wrong,” Page said during a Nov. 22 appearance on Fox Business.
“We’ve known these things are wrong for a long time but the fake news and the Democrats keep pushing this false narrative.”
Reports this week indicated that the Department of Justice (DOJ) was conducting a criminal investigation into a former FBI attorney who allegedly altered a document tied to the bureau’s surveillance of Page. U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is conducting a criminal investigation into issues tied to the investigation and surveillance of the Trump campaign before and after the 2016 presidential election, is looking into the matter.
During the interview, Page also accused media outlets of “putting false information out there, the media, the Democrats, and their allies in Washington in the media.”
Page said the warrant obtained to surveil him was obtained fraudulently. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against Page, which requires approval by a judge, was renewed multiple times. Page said the FBI misled the courts. He was also in contact with at least one person who was later revealed to be a spy for the government, British professor Stefan Halper.
The ordeal since 2016 has featured “false allegations, which the Democrats, their consultants, and their lawyers were all pushing,” Page said, adding that they “found someone from Yahoo News to put out this defamatory information to the world and really interfere in the U.S. presidential election.”
The news reports were used by the FBI to renew the FISA applications when the source of the information was the FBI itself.
Page sued Yahoo over a story by reporter Michael Isikoff, one of the first reporters to write about the Trump-Russia collusion theory, arguing that the suit brought death threats against him; that suit was dismissed last year (pdf) by a federal judge.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on alleged FISA abuses by the DOJ and the FBI during the 2016 presidential election is expected to be released on Dec. 9, Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said this week. Graham has scheduled Horotiwz to testify to the committee two days later.
