On Tuesday morning, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) joined Fox & Friends to push the conspiracy theory that the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign is rooted in the anti-Trump bias of Obama-era officials. But host Ainsley Earhardt took things a step further by suggesting the very FISA court that granted a warrant to surveil former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page was corrupted by political motives.
Referring to the 11 FISA court judges, Earhardt incorrectly claimed three of them were appointed by former President Bill Clinton (in fact two were), adding: “All it takes is one judge, right, to make the decision.”
“When that application is put in front of the court, there is one judge there making the decisions, that’s right,” Jordan replied. “And there are subsequent times that it has to get renewed where there could be different judges, but there is one judge at the time.”
All 11 FISA judges were appointed to the FISA court by Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by former President George W. Bush. Earhardt, however, is suggesting that any judge who was appointed to the federal bench by Clinton would have a conflict of interest when it came to cases involving Trump campaign officials.
Ironically, Earhardt’s logic — that any judge appointed by a Democrat is incapable of following the law when it comes to cases involving Republican officials — would lead to the complete politicization of the courts.
In fact, if a person was constructed in a lab to look like a legitimate target of FISA surveillance, they would resemble Carter Page. While Jordan joined Trump’s favorite show on Tuesday morning, Page was on Good Morning America struggling to explain why a man who bragged about advising the Kremlin before joining the Trump campaign wouldn’t be a legitimate target of surveillance.
“There was a lot of people advising.” Page said. “We were part of an informal group — meeting in Geneva, Paris, we had a meeting in the New York Stock Exchange. The first meeting was in the New York Stock Exchange, the center of capitalism, right?”