The top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Thursday, noted that the “swamp” failed to stop U.S. President Donald Trump’s supporters from electing him to office nor efforts to remove him.

Referring to the FBI lying to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap on the Trump campaign in 2016, Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) told Fox News contributor Sara Carter, the moderator:

This was something that was done — it was calculated. It was something that they had begun, this process and these investigations. They went after candidate Trump, but really and truly, you know, what they were trying to stop is you. And you would not let them. And I think that’s what we got to remember. They wanted to stop you. The swamp wanted to stop you. They wanted to stop you from electing this president, and they couldn’t.

The FBI’s surveillance of the Trump campaign triggered the Russia collusion hoax probe by special prosecutor Robert Mueller.

Michale Horowitz, the inspector general (IG) at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), revealed that the FBI misled the FISA court to get wiretaps that allowed federal investigators to spy in a report issued in December.

When that failed to provide the Democrats with amunition to remove the president from office, the anti-Trump party resorted to a Ukraine-linked impeachment probe that also fell short of the goal.

The Democrat-controlled House succeeded in impeaching the president, exclusively along party lines, charging him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Congressman Collins, one of Trump’s fiercest defenders during the impeachment process, mocked House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and former FBI Director James Comey at CPAC, calling the Democrats’ impeachment efforts a “sham.”

“I’ve come to the conclusion — I’ve said this many times before. He may not like it. I don’t care — Adam Schiff can’t spell truth, much less tell it,” Collins noted.

This month, the Republican-led Senate acquitted the president of the articles of impeachment leveled against him, also almost entirely along party lines.

Rep. Collins proclaimed:

When you look at it, and you go forward, you really have to wonder: [How] did the politicization of this [FISA] process become — and I think that’s what we’ve been exposing … when I started releasing transcripts a little over a year ago. You started … peel[ing] back the page on what we’re seeing here. When you take in the Mueller report, what a waste of time … and taxpayer dollars — to come to something we knew already based on faulty information from a faulty dossier [that] was brought before a court and should’ve never been there.

Alluding to the problems afflicting the Washington, DC-based federal government, President Trump vowed to “drain the swamp” while running for president during the last election cycle.

In December 2019, DOJ Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz issued a report that found at least 17 “significant errors or omissions” in the process to obtain a FISA to surveil Carter Page, a Trump campaign official.

Horowitz indicated that former President Barack Obama may have known the FBI was surveilling the top rival of its party, Trump.

The DOJ watchdog explicitly lambasted the FBI’s reliance on the debunked anti-Trump dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele on behalf of Trump’s political rival at the time, Hillary Clinton.

Congress and the DOJ are mulling potential reforms to the FISA surveillance law as they discuss its authorization before it expires in less than a month.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr has appointed United States Attorney John Durham to conduct a comprehensive criminal investigation of the origins of the Russian collusion hoax investigation.