Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page confirmed to Fox News on Thursday that he has not been interviewed by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz as part of his probe into potential surveillance abuses by intelligence officials during the Russia investigation.
Page told Fox News that he is frustrated that he has had no input in Horowitz’s review, given his central role in the probe. Page was monitored by the FBI pursuant to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant that was approved in October 2016 and renewed several times.
Last month, Horowitz told lawmakers his team is nearly finished with its long-awaited review of alleged surveillance abuses by the DOJ and FBI, saying it has submitted a draft to Attorney General Bill Barr and is “finalizing” the report ahead of its public release.
NEWLY DECLASSIFIED DOCS REVEAL FISA ABUSES IN TARGETING AMERICANS
The inspector general said his team has “reviewed over 1 million records and conducted over 100 interviews, including several of witnesses who only recently agreed to be interviewed.”
But RealClearInvestigations first reported that Page was not among those witnesses.
Onetime Trump adviser Carter Page addresses the audience during a presentation in Moscow in 2016. (Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin)
“We have now begun the process of finalizing our report by providing a draft of our factual findings to the department and the FBI for classification determination and marking,” Horowitz wrote in a letter to several House and Senate committees. “This step is consistent with our process for reports such as this one that involve classified material.”
The FISA warrant applications targeting Page relied heavily on the now-discredited Steele dossier on Trump, which was funded by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The FBI formally documented the apparent anti-Trump bias of the dossier’s author, British ex-spy Christopher Steele, shortly after the November 2016 presidential election — yet despite the red flags, continued to use his unverified dossier in the FISA applications, records obtained by Fox News earlier this year showed.
WATCH: CARTER PAGE SAYS FBI INFORMANT ‘INTENSIFIED’ COMMS JUST BEFORE FISA WARRANT
Meanwhile, a key FBI player during the time frame, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, is facing the prospect of federal charges after Horowitz faulted him in a separate inquiry over statements he made during a Hillary Clinton-related investigation. The review found that McCabe “lacked candor” when talking with investigators, but the former FBI official has denied wrongdoing.
Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu has recommended moving forward with charges against McCabe, a CNN contributor, though no indictment has been handed down.
Horowitz’s inquiry is not the only ongoing review at the DOJ. Barr has also assigned John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to conduct an inquiry into alleged misconduct and alleged improper government surveillance on the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election.
Fox News reported this week that based on what he has been finding, Durham has expanded his investigation adding agents and resources, according to senior administration officials. The timeline has grown from the beginning of the probe through the election and now has included a post-election timeline through the spring of 2017, up to when Robert Mueller was named special counsel investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.
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And U.S. Attorney John Huber was appointed by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to review not only alleged surveillance abuses by the Justice Department and the FBI, but also their handling of the investigation into the Clinton Foundation and other matters.
Fox News’ Catherine Herridge, Bret Baier Alex Pappas and Cyd Upson contributed to this report.
