Senator Marco Rubio has openly contradicted President Donald Trump, saying he believes the FBI did nothing wrong in wiretapping a former Trump campaign advisor.
‘I don’t think they did anything wrong,’ the Republican senator from Florida said of the FBI’s surveillance activities, speaking on Sunday in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State Of The Union.
Rubio was responding to the Saturday release of the FBI’s heavily-redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant applications for domestic surveillance on Page, then an advisor to Trump’s campaign.
Republicans have charged that the FBI relied heavily on British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s Democrat-funded ‘dirty dossier’ to convince the secret court to approve the surveillance on Page.
Rubio disagreed: ‘I think they went to the court, they got the judges to approve it, they laid out all the information, and there was a lot of reasons unrelated to the dossier for why they wanted to look at Carter Page, and Carter Page was not a key member of the Trump campaign.’
Marco Rubio expressed his disagreement with Trump that the FBI spied on his presidential campaign in Sunday interviews with State Of The Union and Face The Nation (above)
Carter Page (above) has never been charged with a crime and strenuously denies that he was ever a foreign agent, but was under FBI surveillance for months before and after the election
Page has never been charged with a crime and strenuously denies that he was ever a foreign agent.
Trump responded to the top secret documents by claiming his campaign had been ‘illegally spied upon’.
‘Looking more & more like the Trump Campaign for President was illegally being spied upon (surveillance) for the political gain of Crooked Hillary Clinton and the DNC,’ he said, referring to the Democratic National Committee.
‘Republicans must get tough now. An illegal Scam!’
Referring to the FISA warrant applications, he said: ‘As usual they are ridiculously heavily redacted but confirm with little doubt that the Department of ‘Justice’ and FBI misled the courts. Witch Hunt Rigged, a Scam!’
Trump is seen on Sunday returning to DC after spending the weekend in New Jersey. He ripped the FBI documents in a string of tweets accusing the agency of spying on his campaign
Former presidential aspirant Rubio disagreed, defending the FBI’s surveillance of Page in a second interview on Sunday with CBS Face The Nation.
‘I have a different view on this issue than the president and the White House. I don’t-They did not spy on the campaign from anything and everything that I have seen,’ Rubio said.
‘So they look at all this information and say we have a guy here who is always in Russia, brags about Russia, and we have reason to believe and they list those reasons why this is someone we should be watching and they follow the legal process by which to do so,’ Rubio continued.
‘I think that’s different from spying on a campaign, in fact that the Trump campaign has said on numerous occasions that Carter Page was not a major player in their campaign.’
Rubio did stick up for Trump’s foreign policy in the CBS interview, saying that ‘the Trump administration’s policies on Russia have been tougher than anything anyone could have imagined. They’ve provided defensive capabilities, offensive capabilities, lethal weapons to Ukraine.’