Former FBI official calls revelations in IG report on FISA abuses 'terrifying'

A former FBI official responded to the release of the Department of Justice Inspector General's report about FISA abuses, calling the revelations "terrifying."

Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker made the comments Wednesday to Neil Cavuto on his Fox News show.

"I don't want to lay this at the foot of the 35,000 good men and women of the FBI," he told Cavuto.

"This is a leadership failure during Comey's time period there," Swecker said, referring to former FBI Director James Comey.

"These are serious abuses. FISA is the most intrusive technique you can use. You can put a microphone in someone's house, you can put a camera in their house. You can intercept their phone calls, you can intercept their emails, their texts, you can mirror their hard drives," he explained.

"You can look at every aspect of someone's life with a FISA order. It's extremely intrusive and to find out there were 17 different errors, omissions and unsupported assertions in there, is absolutely is terrifying to me," he concluded.

"We gotta make sure that the people who did this are held accountable," Swecker continued. "It's not the FBI, it's the Comey leadership team, it comes from the top."

Comey's accountability

Swecker went on to opine that Comey needed to take some responsibility for the failures outlined in the report under his tenure.

"So should it be holding him accountable as well and that something should be done about Mr. Comey as well?" Cavuto asked.

"I do think so. This is not the last word and I would say you're setting a low bar if you start celebrating the fact that we committed some serious serious abuses here but we didn't have a bad state of mind or it wasn't out of political bias," Swecker responded.

"Well that's a pretty low bar. The abuses happened and if you were on the receiving end of that I just wonder how you would feel," he added.

"So this needs to be addressed, the conduct needs to be deterred," he concluded. "[FBI Director] Chris Wray is about to implement about 40 different remedial measures to make sure it never does happen again.

Here's the video of Swecker's comments: