Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report has backfired on Democrats, prompting questions about the legality of the methods used by the FBI before and during the
The Republicans are determined to get to the bottom of the FBI investigation into the Donald Trump campaign, dubbed by the US president as nothing short of an attempted «coup».
On 25 April, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee Charles E. Grassley and Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Committee of Homeland Security and Governmental affairs, submitted a letter to Attorney General William Barr asking him to explain his 10 April notion that «spying» on the Trump team «did occur» and urging him to tell US lawmakers what he knows about the «genesis and conduct of intelligence activities directed at the Trump campaign during 2016» at a briefing scheduled for «no later than 9 May 2019».
While the FBI sought and received a FISA warrant authorising electronic surveillance on Trump’s ex-aide Carter Page on 21 October 2016, there were reports indicating that the federal agency could have illegally spied on the Trump team.
On 22 March 2017, then House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes dropped the bombshell that the intelligence community had «incidentally collected information about US citizens involved in the Trump transition». Earlier, former CIA/NSA contractor Dennis Montgomery blew the whistle on alleged «systematic illegal surveillance» on prominent Americans and US businessmen, including Donald Trump.
Speaking to Sputnik, Charles Ortel, a Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist who has conducted a private inquiry into the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud for the past few years, noted that «the Obama Administration had been spying, illegally, on Americans for approximately four years through 2016», citing US attorney Joe DiGenova.
Techno Fog, a pseudonym for a Texan lawyer, opined that the FBI may have started gathering intelligence on Donald Trump’s associates before receiving a FISA warrant and even earlier than the agency’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the alleged Trump-Russia ties kicked off on 31 July 2016.
He cited FISC Judge Rosemary Collyer’s 26 April 2017 opinion on FISA abuses and potential Fourth Amendment violations that said that «private contractors had access to raw FISA information on FBI storage systems».
