Justice Department Inspector General Finds ‘Serious Performance Failures’ in FBI’s Carter Page Probe

The Justice Department’s top watchdog blasted the FBI for a series of “fundamental errors” in its probe of a Trump campaign official but said it found no evidence that political bias fueled the investigation.

Less than an hour after the long-awaited findings from Inspector General Michael Horowitz were released, a federal prosecutor conducting a separate investigation of the FBI’s action—and reporting directly to Attorney General Bill Barr—pushed back.

“Our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department,” John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, said in response to Horowitz’s report.

“Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”

Although Horowitz, in his report, concluded that the FBI had sufficient evidence to launch its counterintelligence probe of Trump associates, he also cited “at least 17 significant errors or omissions” in the FBI’s applications to surveil ex-Trump adviser Carter Page.

The problems with the efforts to secure authorization were so concerning that Horowitz is opening a new audit looking at how the FBI obtains authorizations from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveil Americans.