WASHINGTON (AP) — A Justice Department inspector general report on the early days of the Russia investigation
identified problems that are “unacceptable and unrepresentative of who
we are as an institution,” FBI Director Chris Wray says in detailing
changes the bureau plans to make in response.
In
an interview Monday with The Associated Press, Wray said the FBI had
cooperated fully with the inspector general — which concluded in its
report that the investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and
Russia was legitimate but also cited serious flaws — and accepted all
its recommendations.
Wray
said the FBI would make changes to how it handles confidential
informants, how it applies for warrants from the secretive Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, how it conducts briefings on foreign
influence for presidential nominees and how it structures sensitive
investigations like the 2016 Russia probe. He said he has also
reinstated ethics training.
“I
am very committed to the FBI being agile in its tackling of foreign
threats,” Wray said. “But I believe you can be agile and still
scrupulously follow our rules, policies and processes.”
President
Donald Trump challenged his FBI director in a tweet Tuesday, claiming
the bureau is “badly broken” and incapable of being fixed.
“I
don’t know what report current Director of the FBI Christopher Wray was
reading, but it sure wasn’t the one given to me,” Trump wrote on
Twitter. “With that kind of attitude, he will never be able to fix the
FBI, which is badly broken despite having some of the greatest men &
women working there!”
Wray
was not FBI director when the Russia investigation began and has so far
avoided commenting in depth on the probe, one of the most politically
sensitive inquiries in bureau history and one that President Donald
Trump has repeatedly denounced as a “witch hunt.” Wray’s comments Monday
underscore the balancing act of his job as he tries to embrace
criticism of the Russia probe that he sees as legitimate while limiting
public judgment of decisions made by his predecessors.
He
said that though it was important to not lose sight of the fact that
Inspector General Michael Horowitz found the investigation justified and
did not find it to be tainted by political bias, “The American people
rightly expect that the FBI, when it acts to protect the country, is
going to do it right — each time, every time.
“And,” he added, “urgency is not an excuse for not following our procedures.”
The
report found that the FBI was justified in opening its investigation in
the summer of 2016 into whether the Trump campaign was coordinating
with Russia to tip the election in the president’s favor. But it also
identified “serious performance failures” up the bureau’s chain of
command, including 17 “significant inaccuracies or omissions” in
applications for a warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court to monitor the communications of former Trump
campaign adviser Carter Page and subsequent warrant renewals.
The
errors, the watchdog said, resulted in “applications that made it
appear that the information supporting probable cause was stronger than
was actually the case.”
Wray
declined to say if there was one problem or criticism that he found
most troubling, but noted, “As a general matter, there are a number of
things in the report that in my view are unacceptable and
unrepresentative of who we are as an institution.”
“This is a serious report,” he added, “and we take it serious.”
_____
Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP
No comments:
Post a Comment