“We have seen no evidence of any officials associated with the Trump team contacting [intelligence officers]”Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who helped initiate and direct the Russia investigation, wrote in internal notes accompanying an article in the New York Times on February 14, 2017.” We are not aware of ANY Trump adviser who strike up talks with Russian intelligence officials. “
Those contacts, Strzok wrote, were limited to the then-Russian ambassador to the United States and the Russian embassy liaison to Congress.
Graham also released a 57-page memo detailing the FBI interview with a primary source for Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence agent whose unverified file on Trump outlined an infamous plot of years to aid his election. That document, which formed part of the 2016 FBI surveillance of a Trump campaign aide, was drafted largely through a network of six sources that this Steele associate trusted, and some of his More explosive and salacious findings were based on speculation of scant origin.
In his New York Times entry, Strzok also indicated that Steele may not have been able to properly judge whether the sources he relied on for his record were reliable. Strzok, who was fired from the office in 2018 after drawing Trump’s fury over private text messages that revealed his disdain for the president, raised strong questions about the Times article, which described “repeated” contacts between Trump’s aides. and Russian intelligence agents.
But the annotated article is also a snapshot in time: It was written before the FBI began investigating veteran Trump associate Roger Stone, who was later charged with obstructing the Congressional investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Stone was later convicted on multiple charges and sentenced to more than three years in prison, but Trump last week commuted his sentence. And it happened before the office found out about a June 2016 meeting at the Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin.
The FBI would also later evaluate Manafort’s longtime associate Konstantin Kilimnik as a figure linked to Russian intelligence.
Still, the document adds to a portrait painted by similar revelations in recent weeks. For example, the FBI had been preparing to close an investigation into Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, until wiretaps emerged from his December 2016 talks with the Russian ambassador to the United States. Stone had been flaunting months of his alleged communications with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who had obtained and published thousands of internal emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign that had been hacked by Russian agents, but the FBI had not started. to investigate their claims.
In a statement, Graham said Strzok’s comments were poorly reflected in the team of special counsel Robert Mueller, who spent two years, starting in 2017, investigating contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
“Mr. Strzok’s statements challenge the entire premise of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump Campaign and make it even more outrageous that the Mueller’s team continues this investigation for almost two and a half years,” said Graham.
However, Trump overcame the investigation in May 2017 when he abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey and invited senior Russian officials to the Oval Office. Comey went on to provide internal notes, through an intermediary, to The New York Times describing his growing concerns about Trump’s stance toward the Russia investigation. Days later, the Justice Department appointed Mueller to take over the Russia investigation, which continued for two more years.
