Goal was to find "anyone" inside GOP campaign tied to Russia who could be get dirt "damaging" to Clinton, newly declassified memos reveal.
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Former FBI Assistant Director for Intelligence Kevin Brock said the information about Papadopoulos' foreign lobbying that the bureau used to open the Russia collusion probe failed to meet the bureau's own legal standards to justify the larger dragnet that encompassed Page and many other Trump officials.
"Normally when the FBI opens an investigation on a U.S. citizen, it has specific facts justifying an investigation of that person," explained Brock, who led the implementation of many of the bureau's current rules for informants and intelligence gathering. "But here what the ECs are saying is they don't know who is involved and they are just conjecturing that someone in the Trump campaign might be in a position to receive help from Russia. You just can't open a full field investigation on conjecture.
"If you look at the FBI's ECs dispassionately, there is no clearly predicated basis for investigation for U.S. citizens, so it looks instead like subterfuge to justify an open-ended inquiry. The only sane, logical explanation why the Crossfire Hurricane team would doggedly perpetuate such an unfounded investigation is political bias,” Brock added.
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Brock, the former FBI executive, said Wray's and Comey's effort to avoid using the word spying in the Russia case were simply semantics.
“What they are doing is using preferred definitions,” he said. “When we employ the investigative techniques used against Carter Page to break the laws of another country and steal their secrets, it’s okay to call it spying. When we use those same techniques against a U.S. citizen, it’s called an investigation."
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It's also called "abuse of power" and "illegal."