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Comey: 'Real sloppiness' in Russia Probe But No Misconduct

Associated Press

   WASHINGTON - Former FBI Director James Comey acknowledged Sunday that a
   Justice Department inspector general report identified "real
   sloppiness" in the surveillance of a former Trump campaign aide and
   said he was wrong to have been "overconfident" about how the Russia
   investigation was handled.

   But Comey also insisted he was right to feel some measure of
   vindication because the report did not find evidence for the most
   sensational of President Donald Trump's claims, including that he had
   been wiretapped and illegally spied on and that the FBI had committed
   treason in investigating ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign.
   "Remember how we got here," Comey said in an interview on "Fox News
   Sunday." "The FBI was accused of criminal misconduct. Remember, I was
   going to jail, and lots of other people were going to jail."
   The inspector general, he added, "did not find misconduct by FBI
   personnel, did not find political bias, did not find illegal conduct."
   The significant mistakes the inspector general identified are "not
   something to sneeze at" but also not evidence of intentional
   misconduct, Comey said.
   In a tweet Sunday, Trump called for an apology from Comey, now that he
   "got caught red handed."
   "So now Comey's admitting he was wrong," Trump wrote. "So what are the
   consequences for his unlawful conduct. Could it be years in jail? Where
   are the apologies to me and others, Jim?"
   The report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that the FBI
   opened the Russia investigation for a legitimate reason and was not
   motivated by partisan bias when it did so.
   But Horowitz also found major errors and omissions in applications the
   FBI submitted to eavesdrop on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
   Those problems include the omission of key information about the
   reliability of a source whose information had been relied on for the
   warrant, and the altering of an email by an FBI lawyer.
   Comey said in retrospect that he was wrong when he said last year that
   the applications to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
   Court were handled in a "thoughtful, responsible way."
   "I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI and Justice had
   built over 20 years. I thought they were robust enough. It's incredibly
   hard to get a FISA. I was overconfident in those," Comey said Sunday.
   "Because he's right," Comey added, referring to Horowitz. "There was
   real sloppiness, 17 things that either should've been in the
   applications or at least discussed and characterized differently. It
   was not acceptable and so he's right. I was wrong."
   Current FBI Director Christopher Wray told The Associated Press last
   week that the report identified problems that the report found problems
   that are "unacceptable and unrepresentative of who we are as an
   institution." The FBI is taking more than 40 steps to fix those
   problems, he said.