Ted Cruz Blasts FBI, DOJ Conduct Revealed By IG Report: ‘This Wasn’t Jason Bourne, This Was Beavis & Butthead’
Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz, who recently released his 476-page report on the FBI’s investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday about the findings of the document. During the testimony, Texas Senator Ted Cruz addressed the findings, which revealed misconduct from lower-level FBI officials as well as abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process.
Cruz described his time in law enforcement and lambasted the FBI leadership that failed to handle the surveillance of Trump’s campaign properly, Mediaite reports. In response to FBI officials “up the chain” claiming ignorance of the misconduct, Cruz said any “responsible” leader would have understood that “there’s no more important decision” than deciding to wiretap a presidential nominee.
“I can tell you, when I was at DOJ [Department of Justice], if someone said let’s tap Hillary Clinton or let’s tap Bill Clinton or John Kerry, the people there would have said, ‘What in the hell are you talking about?'” he added.
“What was going on here — this wasn’t Jason Bourne, this was Beavis and Butthead.”
Per Fox News, the 48-year-old politician appeared on America’s Newsroom after the release of the IG report and spoke with host Bill Hemmer about the Wednesday hearing, which Cruz said would be “very valuable.” Nevertheless, Cruz admitted that he believes the report was “nothing short of stunning.”
During his appearance, Cruz touched on the “blatant misconduct” in the report on behalf of the FBI and DOJ.
“It details 17 serious misstatements that the FBI Department of Justice made to the FISA court, statements that just weren’t backed up by facts.”
Ted Cruz cracked a joke about ‘Beavis and Butthead’ during the Senate hearing with Justice Dept Inspector General Horowitz pic.twitter.com/xqsjwHEUjz
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) December 11, 2019
Despite the many incidences of misconduct, Horowitz nevertheless concluded that the FBI had reason to launch their investigation into Trump’s campaign and said their decision-making was not motivated by politics. Yet, Cruz disagreed with this conclusion, claiming that the report made it “clear” that the senior leadership was motivated by politics.
Cruz also noted the questionable reliability of Christopher Steele’s dossier, which was used to secure a wiretap of Trump campaign staffer Carter Page and funded in part by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
As The Inquisitr reported, Cruz isn’t the only one concerned with the findings of the IG report. George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley called the findings “damning” for the FBI and “unsettling” for everybody else. Like Cruz, Turley noted the many instances of misconduct and the DOJ’s failure to review specific facts and sources in the Steel dossier.
