Investigative journalist Sara Carter says she can identify the precise moment she understood the FBI had been spying on Donald Trump's presidential transition, and it came not from a leak or a document dump, but from watching how federal agents behaved during an interview at Trump Tower in January 2017.
Carter, appearing on Fox News, described the scene in granular detail. She had been investigating the FBI's counterintelligence activities when she learned that agents, including Peter Strzok, had been sent to interview then-National Security Adviser designate Michael Flynn at the White House. But it was an earlier episode, during the transition period, that crystallized her suspicions about the bureau's conduct toward the incoming administration.
As Carter told Fox News, the critical moment arrived when she realized the FBI had been monitoring Flynn's phone calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition. The bureau already possessed transcripts of those calls before agents sat down with Flynn, meaning the interview itself was not a genuine fact-finding exercise. It was, in Carter's view, a trap designed to catch Flynn in a misstatement.
Carter explained that the FBI's possession of those transcripts, obtained through surveillance of Kislyak under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, revealed the scope of the bureau's interest in the incoming president's team. The calls between Flynn and Kislyak were legitimate transition communications, the kind any incoming national security adviser would conduct. Yet the FBI treated them as evidence of something sinister.
The journalist said she began pulling the thread from there, and what unraveled was a pattern of intelligence community activity aimed squarely at Trump's circle. That pattern, she argued, stretched well beyond Flynn and touched the broader question of whether federal law enforcement had weaponized its surveillance powers against a political opponent.
Carter highlighted the role of Peter Strzok, the senior FBI counterintelligence agent who was later removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team after anti-Trump text messages between Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page became public. Strzok had been a central figure in both the Clinton email investigation and the opening of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane probe into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
It was Strzok who conducted the January 2017 interview with Flynn at the White House. Internal FBI documents released years later showed that agents debated beforehand whether the goal was to "get him to lie" or to gather information. Those documents, Carter noted, confirmed what she had suspected from the start: the interview was not conducted in good faith.
Flynn ultimately pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI about his Kislyak conversations, but later withdrew that plea. The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr moved to drop the case in 2020, and Trump pardoned Flynn in November of that year. The entire saga became a flashpoint in the debate over whether the FBI had overstepped its authority during the 2016 election cycle and the subsequent transition.
The recent dismissal of at least 10 FBI agents over their roles in Jack Smith's Trump investigations has only deepened questions about whether the bureau's conduct toward Trump and his allies reflected institutional bias rather than legitimate law enforcement priorities.
Carter's account draws attention back to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Cold War-era statute that authorizes secret court orders for electronic surveillance of foreign agents and, in some cases, U.S. persons communicating with them. The FISA court operates behind closed doors, and its orders are classified, which means targets of surveillance rarely learn about it in real time.
In the Trump-Russia investigation, the FBI obtained FISA warrants to surveil Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser. The Justice Department's inspector general later found significant errors and omissions in the FBI's FISA applications, including the failure to disclose that a key source for the Steele dossier, which supported the warrant applications, had been previously investigated by the FBI as a possible Russian agent.
Sara Carter (no relation to Carter Page) said those FISA abuses were part of the same institutional pattern she identified early on. The surveillance of Kislyak's communications, which swept up Flynn's side of the conversations, operated under a different legal authority. But the effect was the same: the FBI gained access to private communications of Trump's incoming team and used that access to build cases against individuals in the president-elect's orbit.
The broader question of how the FBI deploys its surveillance tools remains a live issue. FBI agents have recently questioned CIA officers about former Director John Brennan's role in the Russia intelligence assessment, a sign that the bureau is now turning its investigative lens on the very intelligence community figures who helped launch the Trump-Russia probe.
Carter framed her reporting as the product of years spent cultivating sources inside the intelligence community and the Justice Department. She said the evidence, taken together, points to a coordinated effort by senior FBI and intelligence officials to undermine Trump's presidency before it began.
She pointed to the January 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference, the Steele dossier briefing delivered to Trump at Trump Tower, and the Flynn interview as three prongs of a single strategy. Each one, she argued, was designed to create a public narrative that Trump's election was tainted by Russian influence and that his associates were compromised.
Carter stopped short of alleging a formal conspiracy in the legal sense, but she made clear she believes the actions were deliberate and coordinated at senior levels. She cited the text messages between Strzok and Page, which included references to an "insurance policy" in the event Trump won the election, as evidence that at least some FBI officials were motivated by political animus rather than legitimate national security concerns.
FBI Director Kash Patel has taken a markedly different approach to the bureau's operations, laying out a pivot toward violent crime and fraud while signaling that the era of politically charged counterintelligence investigations is over.
The Flynn case and the broader Crossfire Hurricane investigation have already produced significant institutional consequences. The Durham investigation, led by Special Counsel John Durham, resulted in one conviction of a low-level FBI lawyer who altered an email used in a FISA application. Two other defendants, including a lawyer for the Clinton campaign, were acquitted at trial.
Critics of the FBI's conduct have argued that Durham's limited courtroom success understated the severity of the bureau's institutional failures. Supporters of the FBI have countered that the investigation found no evidence of a political conspiracy and that the bureau acted within its authority, even if individual agents made errors.
Carter's public account places her firmly in the camp that views the FBI's actions as a serious abuse of power. Her willingness to identify a specific moment, the realization that agents already had Flynn's call transcripts before interviewing him, gives her narrative a concrete anchor that broader critiques of the Russia investigation sometimes lack.
The FBI's current posture toward its own recent history remains a subject of intense interest. Recent FBI field operations, including agents showing up at the home of a top Milwaukee County election official, suggest the bureau is actively engaged in a range of sensitive investigations, even as it grapples with the legacy of the Trump-era probes.
Carter's account is not new in its broad outlines. The basic facts of the Flynn interview, the FISA abuses, and the Strzok-Page texts have been public for years. What her Fox News appearance adds is the personal testimony of a journalist who says she identified the pattern in real time, before the inspector general reports and the Durham probe confirmed many of her suspicions.
For conservative legal observers, the significance lies in the question of accountability. The FBI agents and officials most directly involved in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation have largely avoided criminal prosecution. Some have been fired or resigned. Others have faced professional consequences but no legal liability.
The institutional reforms that followed, including changes to the FISA application process and new internal compliance requirements, have been criticized by some as insufficient. The question of whether the FBI's leadership culture has genuinely changed, or whether the same institutional incentives that produced Crossfire Hurricane remain in place, is one that Carter's reporting keeps alive.
When a journalist can point to the exact moment she realized a federal agency was surveilling an incoming president's team, and the facts bear her out, the question is no longer whether it happened. The question is whether anyone with real authority will ensure it never happens again.
