Justice Dept. Will Be Investigated Over Surveillance of Trump Campaign Official

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s inspector general, facing increasing political pressure from Republicans in Congress and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, said on Wednesday that his office would investigate the surveillance of a former Trump campaign official.

The announcement came amid a stream of attacks in recent months from the White House and Republican lawmakers seeking to undermine the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election.

The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, said he would examine whether law enforcement officials complied with the law and departmental policies in seeking permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap the former campaign adviser, Carter Page. Law enforcement officials had long had concerns that Page, a former investment banker based in Moscow, was acting as a Russian agent.

Republicans have seized on details about the court-ordered surveillance of Page as evidence that the Justice Department abused its authority in the Russia investigation. Horowitz did not name Page in his announcement.

Horowitz said he would also review what the Justice Department and the FBI knew at the time about a former British spy and longtime FBI source, Christopher Steele, who provided information about Page that was included in the surveillance application.

Republicans on Capitol Hill welcomed the decision but acknowledged that it fell short of demands by three Republican committee chairmen that the Justice Department appoint a second special counsel to investigate the accusations of surveillance abuses.

“This is not a substitute for a special counsel to investigate this and other matters,” said Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte, R-Va., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, adding that the inspector general’s office “does not have authority to compel witness interviews, including from past employees, so its investigation will be limited in scope in comparison to a special counsel investigation.”

Democrats feared that the investigation would further politicize a Justice Department that seems intent on appeasing President Donald Trump. But they said they were confident the review would confirm that the department and the FBI had acted properly.

“Any objective review of these claims should tell us what we already know — that the FBI was right, that there was sufficient evidence to continue investigating certain Trump campaign officials for their connections to the Russian government, and that the Republicans are desperate to distract from that investigation,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

Horowitz’s office is in the final stages of another high-profile investigation studying several contentious decisions made at the FBI and Justice Department during the 2016 presidential campaign. Findings from one piece of that investigation prompted the firing this month of the former FBI deputy director, Andrew G. McCabe. Horowitz is expected to release a broader report on his entire review in the coming weeks.

The decision punctuated a year of attacks by Trump on the Justice Department and the special counsel investigation. McCabe, who as a former top FBI official is a potential witness in the inquiry, insisted he was fired in an effort to discredit any testimony he might give.

The debate over the surveillance of Page exploded into public view in January when Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee revealed that they had assembled a classified memo accusing law enforcement leaders of abusing their power to spy on Page.

The document’s chief claim was that the officials repeatedly used unsubstantiated Democratic-funded opposition research from Steele to obtain the surveillance warrant without adequately explaining to the judge the source of the information.

Trump declassified the memo over the objections of the FBI, which said it had “grave concerns” over its accuracy, a rare public break from the White House. Once it was released, Trump enthusiastically trumpeted it as evidence that the Russia investigation had been concocted to smear him politically.

Democrats on the committee countered with a memo of their own — one the president declined to declassify — offering a point-by-point refutation of the Republican document and blasting it as an intentionally misleading attempt to undermine the Russia investigation. They said law enforcement officials acted properly in seeking permission to spy on Page.

Former career prosecutors said that the accusations of surveillance abuse had eroded trust in the Justice Department.

“This is a continuation of a coordinated effort to discredit the special counsel’s work through political attacks on career public servants in the FBI,” said Christopher Hunter, a former FBI agent and federal prosecutor who left the Justice Department last year. “Sow disinformation, discredit the FBI and the Justice Department in the minds of our own American citizens, all to undermine the special counsel and create an environment of confusion and doubt about the legitimacy of the special counsel’s work — that’s what Russian intelligence would do to destabilize our society, yet that’s what’s being done by our own government officials and their collaborators.”

Sessions has tried to strike a balance between appeasing Trump and other conservatives assailing the Justice Department without alienating the 113,000 or so people who work under him.

But House Republicans grew frustrated with how the department was handling their concerns over a variety of issues including the surveillance of Page, the firing of McCabe and the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state. In a letter last week to the deputy attorney general, Goodlatte said that the department was moving too slowly and he issued a subpoena last week demanding that officials turn over documents related to those issues.

The Justice Department said in a letter sent Tuesday to Goodlatte that it would work “to enhance the rate of productions,” and that it would schedule a meeting with the committee and the FBI to discuss how the department would further respond.

Christopher A. Wray, the director of the FBI, said in a news release that he had doubled the number of employees assigned to expedite the request for documents, with a total of 54 people working in shifts from 8 a.m. to midnight.