Republicans on the Senate Finance and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee unveiled a report Friday documenting abuses by the FBI and the General Services Administration (GSA) undermining President Donald Trump’s transition team.
The majority staff report, released by committees chaired by Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, shows that the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office secretly sought private records between Trump’s transition team and the GSA that were supposed to be discarded following the completion of the White House transition.
“Every major presidential candidate over the past five decades — both winners and losers in the general election — has made use of government assistance to support his or her transition team under the assumption that government employees were cooperating with the team in good faith,” Senate investigators wrote. “That presumption of good faith was called into question in 2016.”
The GSA had previously agreed with incoming Republicans that records from the Trump transition team, Trump for America, were private and would not be kept following the transition. The majority report reveals, however, that the GSA, at the FBI’s request, retained documents in violation of the agreement.
“After Trump for America learned about the preservation, the GSA refused to provide it with copies of all remaining transition team records,” the report reads. “In August 2017, the Special Counsel sought and received the production of all remaining transition team records for 13 different Trump for America officials, including then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, then-national security advisor to the vice president Keith Kellogg, and Jared Kushner.”
The special counsel, investigators wrote, requested the records in question from FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who also fabricated evidence against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page over the course of the Russia investigation. The ex-FBI attorney pled guilty in August on charges to emerge from an investigation run by U.S. Attorney John Durham studying the origins of the Russia hoax.
The majority Senate report marks the latest revelation in the deep-state actors attempting to delegitimize the Trump administration following the president’s 2016 victory.
As Trump prepared to take office, the Obama administration weaponized U.S. intelligence agencies already conducting surveillance of the Trump campaign to carry out a coup operation, framing the president as a Kremlin agent, that would ultimately warrant impeachment.
A more than two-year special counsel investigation, run with near-unlimited resources, later exonerated the president.
Read the full report here:
GOP Senate Report On FBI, G… by The Federalist
