FBI Director Kash Patel says the FBI lied to obtain surveillance warrants that were used to illegally spy on Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign and his first term in office.
“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,” Patel told Sean Hannity during Tuesday’s episode of Hang Out with Sean Hannity.
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From there, the political party would then “funnel that to, not just the intelligence community, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then take those packaged lies that they had paid for with campaign finance funds and go into a secret surveillance court,” Patel continued, “and illegally spy on your opponent to be the next President of the United States.
“That took two years of my life,” Patel reiterated. “And what did we find out? The FISA court themselves came back and said these warrants were illegal, that the FBI did not provide evidence of exculpatory evidence and innocence, and that the FBI essentially lied in those applications.”
The FBI director went on to say that this was merely “step one,” adding, “I knew it didn’t stop there.”
“I knew in the four years that we were out of office that they continued to regenerate that institution of weaponization,” Patel said, adding that in those four years, he learned “I was illegally spied on by the likes of [former U.S. deputy attorney general] Rod Rosenstein and [former FBI director] Chris Wray.”
Patel added that “ten other staffers on the Hill, and people who were elected to serve this country in the halls of Congress” were also illegally spied on.
“They were actually continuing the weaponization that Donald Trump and I exposed during Trump One [President Trump’s first term], and we caught them,” he said.
“I knew walking in the door the following: These individuals, these purported leaders of law enforcement and government are so arrogant that they write the stuff down themselves to memorialize how great they are,” Patel added.
The FBI director went on to assert, “That’s how we caught them in RussiaGate. It wasn’t my documents. It was their emails.”
“It was their FISA application. It was their bogus Steele dossier. It was their unverified reporting that was documented in FBI holdings that we put out and that you covered,” Patel declared.
“I knew there were other places that that information was hidden,” he added. “So, day one I set out to find it and we found it.”
Notably, Patel’s remarks come as scrutiny grows over the federal government’s use of surveillance powers, shortly after Congress’s 45-day renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
