The alleged abuses by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court are worse than Watergate, according to former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone.
“I think the president should push ahead aggressively with the declassification of all of the information surrounding the FISA warrants, which essentially was the politically motivated spying on the Trump campaign, using the authority and power of government. That’s an abuse of power far worse than Watergate,” Stone told Hill.TV’s Buck Sexton and Krystal Ball in an interview on “Rising” that aired Friday.
Stone said President Trump should move forward with declassifying the documents in light of a New York Times article that said Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein proposed wearing a wire to record his conversations with the president, in addition to discussing invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
Rosenstein called the Times article “factually incorrect,” and some officials defending Rosenstein said his comments were made in jest.
Special counsel Robert Mueller is said to be looking into whether Stone had any advance knowledge of the WikiLeaks dump of the hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) documents during the 2016 presidential race.
Stone has not been charged with a crime in connection with Mueller’s probe, which is being overseen by Rosenstein, but has said he expects to be indicted.
Trump last week directed the sensitive documents related to the Russia probe to be declassified, including portions of a surveillance application that helped the FBI monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The documents also include “all text messages relating to the Russia investigation” from former FBI Director
James Comey and other top federal officials.
However, the president later delayed the release of the documents, saying “key allies” expressed concerns of the declassification.
Some House Republicans have argued that the FISA warrant for Page was wrongly obtained because it pulled information from the unverified dossier on Trump compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele during the 2016 campaign.
— Julia Manchester