Roger Stone praised the "brave" House lawmakers who voted down the reauthorization of a controversial domestic surveillance program, telling Newsmax on Thursday that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) had been "weaponized" against Americans.
Stone, a former campaign adviser to Donald Trump, joined "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE" a day after 19 House Republicans joined Democrats and rejected the measure, 228-193.
"The FISA court was created, this act was created to protect the country from foreign terrorism and foreign nations. But it has been weaponized against U.S. citizens," Stone said.
At issue for Republicans is that the FBI used FISA four times to surveil former Trump campaign associate Carter Page. The Justice Department said in January 2020 that two of the four times were invalid.
"[Former] FBI Director [James] Comey testified under oath, saying that they had a rich mosaic of evidence to justify the FISA warrant against Carter Page, who was working for Donald Trump," Stone said.
"But what we later learned is all they had was the Steele dossier, which the FBI former general counsel Andrew Weissmann, among others, who really ran the [Robert] Mueller [Russia] investigation, knew was a fraud. They all knew it was a fraud.
"Hats off to those brave Republican congressmen who have blocked the reauthorization of this law that is being used to allow the government to spy on American citizens in secret without a warrant," he added.
A U.S. court last year found that the FBI improperly searched the FISA database 278,000 times over several years.
"What's wrong with the old standard of the government making a case to a judge that there's probable cause, producing probable cause for a warrant? Show me evidence of a crime and then we'll surveil somebody," Stone said. "But this? Again, [it was] part of the Russian collusion hoax, the abuse of the FISA warrants.
"And here's the other point: Not only did they did they approve the warrants, but they reauthorized them multiple times long after the time they knew that Carter Page wasn't talking to any Russians, long after the time it had been established that the underlying material that justified the warrant, the Steele dossier, was a fraud," he said.
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