FBI Director Kash Patel accused the FBI of lying to judges to obtain surveillance warrants in order to spy on President Trump.
“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 in an appearance on “Hang Out with Sean Hannity.”
“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,” he said.
Patel explained that FISA warrants were used to illegally spy on Trump and other officials during the 2016 campaign and the following years. “I was illegally spied on by the likes of [former U.S. Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein and [former FBI Director] Chris Wray and 10 other staffers on the Hill and people who were elected to serve this country in the halls of Congress,” he said.
“The FISA court themselves came back and said these warrants were illegal,” Patel added. “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.”
Patel revealed earlier this year that his phone records were seized by the agency under the Biden administration as part of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of President Trump.
“It is outrageous and deeply alarming that the previous FBI leadership secretly subpoenaed my own phone records – along with those of now White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles – using flimsy pretexts and burying the entire process in prohibited case files designed to evade all oversight,” he told Reuters at the time.
