Former Donald Trump 2016 campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos told Newsmax on Tuesday that there are pros and cons to the release of the John Durham report and that Congress needs to act on the revelations that came out of it.
"The good is that Durham finally laid out the road map into the conspiracy between the United States intelligence agencies, the media and the [Hillary] Clinton campaign to essentially frame the Trump campaign," Papadopoulos said during an appearance on Newsmax's "The Chris Salcedo Show." "He did this in his report, and he also laid it out in federal court in the two cases against [Michael] Sussmann and [Igor] Danchenko. Of course, the second, very obvious, positive news that came out of the report is that he established that there was never any foundation or basis to launch this now discredited investigation."
"The ugly is that he did not recommend prosecutions," he continued. "The individuals who put the country through this entire saga for four years are now going on national television; they've been getting book contracts, television contracts. They're mocking the report. And this is something that's a finger in the eye of the American people. So that's something that I think Congress has to address when they bring him in to testify — to find out exactly why he decided to punt on the key players while looking after the little fish like Sussmann and Danchenko."
The secret court used to obtain warrants to spy on individuals is up for renewal, but the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's (FISA) reputation has been damaged by the Durham report and other findings from government weaponization investigations.
Section 702 of FISA grants the National Security Agency the authority to spy on the U.S. telecommunications activity of suspected terrorists, but The Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI has been using the tool on American citizens as well, with more than 278,000 violations in 2020 and early 2021.
Papadopolous said it would "certainly" be fair to characterize the FBI as "rotten to the core."
"This is the consequence of not holding these people accountable," he said. "When you didn't hold them accountable in 2016, we later found out that the CIA was willfully interfering and colluding with Big Tech in the 2020 election to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story and to basically let the American public think that that was Russian disinformation. So that was a consequence of that."
"And of course, now, when you aren't holding them accountable for their egregious misconduct regarding the FISA court, in which they used fabricated evidence to defraud a FISA court to get a FISA warrant against an American citizen, to spy on the Trump campaign," he continued. "Now look exactly what they're doing in 2021. So, this is a disturbing trend that will only continue unless Congress acts and that means defunding this organization until there are systemic changes and/or leadership changes at the top. This has to happen."
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