And while investigators did not find documentary or testimonial evidence of “intentional misconduct” on the part of the bureau’s case agents, the report says they did not receive “satisfactory explanations for the errors or problems we identified.”
All of this counts as an abuse of the FISA process. Not too long ago this was something that concerned Democrats, who led the charge to create the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after horrendous surveillance abuse was uncovered in the 1970s. That legislation created a role for the courts to oversee the surveillance state’s electronic eavesdropping.
Now Democrats act as a firewall for that surveillance state. Some of this is because Trump has used his perch at the White House to attack the credibility on the FBI and the intelligence community in general. Echoing the online conspiracy theories of fringe left and right, Trump refers to these institutions as the “deep state.” Democrats have sought to defend the legitimacy of these institutions.
But their reaction has also blinded them to real abuses. Consider the January 29, 2018, memo from House Intelligence Committee Democrats defending the FISA warrant of Page. It asserts that the FBI would have been “remiss in their duty to protect the country had they not sought a FISA warrant and repeated renewals to conduct temporary surveillance of Carter Page.” This position now looks absurd.
The ranking member of that committee at the time was Representative Adam Schiff. Today he is assembling the impeachment case against Trump. Last year, the broad outlines of the Horowitz report were undoubtedly known to Schiff and his colleagues. In 2018, Schiff could have acknowledged the FBI’s errors in the Page warrant and sought the kinds of reforms that Horowitz recommends in 2019.
Instead, Schiff decided to accuse his Republican colleagues of misleading the public about the Page warrant. Psychologists have a term for this: They call it “projection.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-10/fbi-inspector-general-report-has-bad-news-for-democrats-too