A The senior Republican defended his committee by publishing the declassified FBI interview with a primary source for former British spy Christopher Steele and said an upcoming document would show that the office misled Congress about the reliability of its anti-Trump dossier.
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, criticized the former MI6 agent, said the Steele record was compromised by Russian disinformation, and argued that the new FBI public notes of a discussion of January 2017 with Steele’s “core subsystem” showed that the FBI knew the file was unreliable, but continued to use it anyway. During her interview with Maria Bartiromo in Sunday Morning Futures On Fox News, he also anticipated the new office records to be released next week and said they would show that the FBI misled not only the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about the Steele dossier, but lawmakers as well.
“We have also discovered, and this will come to light next week, that Congress was suspicious of the Russian source and the reliability of the Steele Dossier, and that members of Congress asked to be informed,” Graham said. “This is what I think I am going to be able to show the public: The FBI not only lied to the court about the reliability of Steele’s record, but also lied to Congress. And that’s a separate crime. ”
Graham said investigators in Congress “became suspicious … of Steele and the reliability of the record” and “then began asking questions of the FBI … and I found the notes that the FBI used to prepare for that briefing.” The South Carolina Republican said: “You will find that not only did the FBI lie to the FISA court, but it lied to Congress” in 2018.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December report on FISA abuse appeared to refer to the notes Graham was referring to, noting that “according to an FBI memo prepared in December 2017 for a congressional briefing , when the Hurricane Crossfire investigation was transferred to the Special Adviser in May 2017, the FBI ‘did not assess the likelihood that the [Steele] [election reporting] was generated in connection with a Russian disinformation campaign. ”
The declassified footnotes now show that the FBI realized that Steele’s file could have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
Igor Danchenko, a 42-year-old Ukrainian-born Russian-trained lawyer, was identified as Steele’s main subcontractor after Graham published declassified documents that undermined the credibility of Steele’s record, including a three-day interview with Danchenko in January 2017, where Danchenko contradicted the claims made on file and undermined the FBI case against Trump’s campaign associate, Carter Page.
Graham said he wants to call the FBI analyst who prepared the memorandum and the case agent who interviewed Danchenko and ask, “Did you tell anyone above you that the file is a piece of Russian disinformation?” Graham dismissed the criticism of the New York Times and others, including Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner, that a source like Danchenko had been denounced, alleging that “Russian disinformation was used by the American police in the form of weapons to persecute a sitting president.” They are laughing out loud in Russia over this. They’d give this guy a medal. ”
Horowitz released a lengthy report in December criticizing the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “major errors and omissions” related to FISA’s orders against Page and the Steele’s office’s dependency on unverified records.
“Now we not only know that the FBI lied to the FISA court about the reliability of the record, but they told the court that the source was truthful and cooperative and based in Russia; the truth is that the source was American.” Graham said. “He was an employee of Christopher Steele, who was on the Democratic Party payroll, and he told Christopher Steele that this is all a bunch of rumors. And when the FBI understood that the file was no longer reliable, they continued to use it. ”
The Horowitz report noted that the renewals of the second and third surveillance requests directed at Page informed the FISA court that, after the interview with Danchenko, “the FBI found the Russia-based sub-source to be truthful and cooperative”. But despite some trips to Russia in 2016, Danchenko had no “Russian base” as he had lived in the United States for many years.
The Justice Department watchdog said the renewals “continued to rely on Steele’s information, without any review or notice to the court that the Primary Source contradicted Steele’s election reports.”
Steele gathered her investigation at the behest of opposition research firm Fusion GPS, funded by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the law firm Perkins Coie.
“[Danchenko] He said to Christopher Steele: ‘This is what I have. It’s talking about a bar. It is rumor. It is a hint. It is not really reliable. And what did Christopher Steele do with that? He turned it into a Tom Clancy novel. He sold it to the FBI, “said Graham. “They sold him to the FISA court to get an arrest warrant for Carter Page. … After knowing it was a bunch of trash, they continued to use it anyway. Someone needs to go to jail. ”
Graham also pointed to another recently declassified document showing typed notes from FBI special agent Peter Strzok, now fired, criticizing New York Times February 2017 report where Strzok criticized Steele.
Graham said Strzok “has a duty to report exculpatory information to the court, he has a duty to notify his superiors that the key document for obtaining arrest warrants against Carter Page, the Russian record, is no longer reliable.” He said he found it “impossible to believe” that FBI Director James Comey and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had not been informed of the flaws in the record, adding: “Anyone who knew that the Russian record was unreliable and continued to obtain a court order”. against Carter Page based on that document he should go to jail for defrauding the court. ”
US Attorney John Durham is expected to release a report on his criminal investigation into the Russia investigation by the end of the summer.
