Fox’s Chris Wallace spars with Comey over Horowitz report

Former FBI Director James Comey sparred with Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Sunday over the Justice Department inspector general’s (IG) report on the bureau’s investigation into President Trump’s campaign and whether the probe cleared the FBI of wrongdoing.

Wallace pressed Comey on “Fox News Sunday” on whether the “victory lap” he said the former FBI director had taken since the report’s release was justified. While Comey has claimed the report by Justice Department IG Michael Horowitz vindicated the FBI, Horowitz in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week said that “the activities we found don’t vindicate anybody who touched this.”

“Maybe it turns upon how we understand the word,” Comey said. “What I mean is the FBI was accused of treason, of illegal spying, of tapping Mr. Trump’s wires illegally, of opening an investigation without justification, of being a criminal conspiracy to defeat and then unseat a president. All of that was nonsense.”

Democrats and Republicans have voiced starkly different views of the Horowitz report. While Trump’s allies point to the litany of errors the inspector general found in the FBI’s handling of the case, Democrats stress that its central conclusion – that the investigation into the Trump campaign was not politically motivated – goes against claims Trump has been making for years about a conspiracy to target him.

{mosads}When Comey admitted to “sloppiness” in handling certain parts of the investigation, Wallace responded that “sloppiness may be a euphemism for what he found” and pointed out the IG found 17 errors in one of the applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court for a warrant to wiretap Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

“Seventeen significant errors in FISA process, and you say it was handled in a thoughtful and appropriate way,” Wallace said.

“He’s right. I was wrong. I was overconfident in the procedures the FBI and Justice had built over 20 years. I thought they were robust enough. It’s incredibly hard to get a FISA. I was overconfident in those. He’s right. There was real sloppiness.”

Wallace repeatedly pressed Comey over his characterization of the Steele dossier’s role in the FBI’s investigation and FISA application.