President Donald Trump said that FBI Director Christopher Wray was wrong in his characterization of the newly released report from the Department of Justice inspector general, calling the bureau “badly broken.”
“I don’t know what report current Director of the FBI Christopher Wray was reading, but it sure wasn’t the one given to me,” Trump wrote early Dec. 10, one day after Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report was released.
“With that kind of attitude, he will never be able to fix the FBI, which is badly broken despite having some of the greatest men & women working there!”
Horowitz found FBI agents made significant errors or omissions while obtaining and seeking to renew a warrant against Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
The FBI also didn’t verify information on Carter Page passed along by former British spy Christopher Steele, who wasn’t a firsthand source for any of the information submitted in his dossier.
The FBI did meet the “low threshold” for the Crossfire Hurricane probe into the Trump campaign, Horowitz said.
The changes were being made “to enhance accuracy and completeness,” Wray said.
Wray said the bureau would be reviewing how certain FBI employees named in the report acted but said many of them are no longer employed at the bureau.
Wray said that the FBI’s “credibility and brand are central to fulfilling our mission” and that the bureau “accepts the Report’s findings and embraces the need for thoughtful, meaningful remedial action.”
In an interview with the Associated Press, Wray declined to say if there was one problem or criticism he found most troubling. “As a general matter, there are a number of things in the report that in my view are unacceptable and unrepresentative of who we are as an institution,” he said.
Speaking at a roundtable in Washington after the report was released on Monday, Trump said that it was “a disgrace what’s happened.”
“It is incredible, far worse than I would have ever thought possible. It’s an embarrassment to our country, it’s dishonest, it’s everything that a lot of people thought it would be, except far worse,” he said.
“Well, they fabricated evidence and they lied to the courts and they did all sorts of things to have it go their way. And this was something we can never allow to happen again. The report actually, especially when you look into it and the details of the report, are far worse than anything I would have imagined,” he added.
“This was an overthrow of government, this was an attempted overthrow and a lot of people were in on it and they got caught, they got caught red-handed. And I look forward to the Durham report, which is coming out in the not too distant future—it’s got its own information, which is this information plus plus plus.”
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