Wednesday, during an appearance on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) warned of the potential for future abuse regarding what was detailed in the report released Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz a day earlier.
According to Grassley, if an FBI motivated by politics would spy on a presidential candidate and his campaign, it could open the door for the same implications for anybody else.
“First of all, let me answer your first issue, will this be just Horowitz and nothing else?” Grassley said. “I can’t speak for Chairman [Lindsey] Graham, but I believe that he’s going to have several other hearings involving other people to get more of these facts out on the ground. Then in regard to Halper, or whether it was Papadopoulos or whether it was Carter Page or whoever you might say, always lower-level people that weren’t in the middle of the Trump campaign, but they were used as an excuse to get court orders so that they could spy on the Trump campaign, and the Trump campaign was spied on.”
“And what — the issue here isn’t just spying on the Trump campaign, the issue is that there’s a lot of constitutional rights that were compromised to get reasons from the court to spy on the Trump campaign,” he continued. “And if it could happen to Trump, it could happen to you, Maria, or anybody else in America. Their civil liberties are potentially violated because of the FBI having political opposition — at least the leaders of the FBI having political opposition to the president and wanting to keep him from being president. Even after he became president, finding ways to get him thrown out of office.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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