FBI Director Kash Patel said former Federal Bureau of Investigation leadership illegally spied on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and into his first term in office.
The allegations he made Tuesday on Fox News’ “Hang out with Sean Hannity” podcast further tied Democratic leaders, including former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom Trump has long accused of conspiring against him, to the investigation.
During Tuesday’s podcast, Patel told Hannity that some requests for surveillance warrants were filed in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by former FBI Director James Comey to spy on Trump and top Cabinet officials, including himself.
“It took me two years of my life to prove the following: that a political party in the United States of America in the 21st century would go overseas and hire some bogus intelligence asset to manufacture fraudulent, fake, unverified information, funnel that to not just the intelligence community, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Patel said.
He continued, “And then take those packaged lies that they had paid for with campaign finance funds and go into a secret surveillance court and illegally spy on your opponent to be the president of the United States.”
Last summer, formerly classified documents released by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, purportedly show the Hillary Clinton campaign came up with the plan to suggest Trump was colluding with Russia when he first ran for office in 2016.
Grassley previously said he believes the documents show the FBI under the Obama administration “failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton’s political gain, which was ultimately done through the Steele Dossier and other means.”
Those findings were released right after Comey and the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, were put under investigation by the Department of Justice for potential wrongdoing in the Trump-Russia probe during the Obama administration.
Brennan and Obama have denied wrongdoing related to the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. Last summer, Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, in an op-ed, called the allegations that they tried to undermine Trump “patently false.”
Patel said that when serving on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 2016, he raised concerns about the surveillance warrants being unverifiable; he said they responded that he was “dead wrong.”
Two years later, the FISA court annulled the FBI-approved warrants, he said.
“The FISA court themselves came back and said these warrants were illegal,” Patel said. “The FBI did not provide evidence of exculpatory evidence and innocence and that the FBI essentially lied in those applications and all the information was unverified.”
“I don’t think that’s ever happened before ... Hollywood couldn’t come up with it.”
Despite it, Patel said the spying continued.
“I knew in the four years that we were out of office, that they continued to regenerate that institution of weaponization,” Patel said. “So when I walked in the door, I said, ‘We only got a bit of it. We only got maybe half of it.’”