FBI Director Kash Patel accused the FBI of lying to obtain surveillance warrants to illegally spy on President Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign and subsequent first term.
Trump has long accused his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, and former President Barack Obama of being ringleaders in an alleged spying conspiracy against his campaign, an allegation both have denied. Patel detailed the yearslong federal investigation into the alleged surveillance on the latest episode of “Hang Out with Sean Hannity.”
“It took me two years of my life to prove the following: that a political party in the United States of America in the 21st century would go overseas and hire some bogus intelligence asset to manufacture fraudulent, fake, unverified information, funnel that to not just the intelligence community, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said.
“And then take those packaged lies that they had paid for with campaign finance funds and go into a secret surveillance court and illegally spy on your opponent to be the president of the United States.”
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Patel’s comments come as scrutiny intensifies over the federal government’s use of spying power and following Congress’ renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for 45 days.
Section 702 of FISA permits authorized U.S. officials to collect phone calls and text messages of foreign targets, but in doing so can also capture Americans’ communications – a piece of legislation Trump strongly opposes.
Patel told Fox News that FISA warrants – some signed by former FBI Director James Comey – were used to illegally spy on Trump and top officials, including himself, during the 2016 campaign and in years that followed.
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“I was illegally spied on by the likes of Rod Rosenstein (former U.S. deputy attorney general) and Chris Wray (former FBI director) and 10 other staffers on the Hill and people who were elected to serve this country in the halls of Congress.”
“They were actually continuing the weaponization that Donald Trump and I had exposed during Trump One [President Trump’s first term].”
Patel was a member of the National Security Council (NSC) in 2019, becoming deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism during Trump’s first term. He was a chief investigator and primary author of the 2018 “Nunes Memo” alleging FBI bias in Trump-Russia interference investigation.
The FBI-approved warrants, Patel shared, were later rescinded by the FISA court in 2018 after a federal investigation into the alleged spying was completed.
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“The FISA court themselves came back and said these warrants were illegal,” the FBI director explained. “The FBI did not provide evidence of exculpatory evidence and innocence and that the FBI essentially lied in those applications and all the information was unverified.”
“I don’t think that’s ever happened before… Hollywood couldn’t come up with this,” he added.
Patel argued that the alleged weaponization of federal law enforcement did not end when Trump first left office in 2021 but was reignited under the Biden administration.
He also vowed to uncover additional evidence.
“I knew in the four years that we were out of office, that they continued to regenerate that institution of weaponization,” Patel said. “So when I walked in the door, I said, ‘We only got a bit of it. We only got maybe half of it.’”
