Glenn Simpson did a grim march down a House hallway October 16 to a committee room where he invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify. The Fusion GPS honcho lacked the swagger of his previous congressional turns—he testified before a closed-door session of the Senate Judiciary Committee in August 2017 and again in November before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In the House testimony, Simpson bragged of the Boy Scout instincts that guided him and Christopher Steele in taking their oppo dossier on Donald Trump and Russia to the FBI in 2016. “The client didn’t instruct us to do that,” he said. “It was viewed as reporting a crime in progress, sort of a citizenship obligation.”
Now, House Republicans continuing the investigation are suggesting that Simpson needed to take the Fifth because the crime in progress was his own testimony.
In his November 14, 2017, House interview, Simpson was asked whether he had ever “heard from anyone in the U.S. government in relation to [the Steele dossier] matters, either the FBI or the Department of Justice?” Simpson responded that he hadn’t until after the election: “during the election, no.” But it turns out he had been in contact months before the election with associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr (whose wife Nellie worked for Fusion GPS). Simpson’s claim that he hadn’t heard from anyone at Justice before the election “is in direct contradiction to what Bruce Ohr told me under oath,” Texas Republican John Ratcliffe said on Fox Business. A member of the House Judiciary Committee, Ratcliffe said, “I’m not surprised that Glenn Simpson is taking the Fifth. He probably should. He’s in real legal jeopardy.”
It was a busy week for the Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which are operating a joint investigation into “Decisions Made by DoJ in 2016.” House investigators on October 18 grilled the former FBI general counsel James Baker. Nellie Ohr was scheduled to testify the following day. Judiciary chairman Bob Goodlatte has tweeted that those witnesses are hardly the only ones he wants to hear from in the coming weeks. He’s “invited” James Comey, Obama attorney general Loretta Lynch, former deputy attorney general Sally Yates, former deputy assistant attorney general Stuart Evans, former DoJ deputy chief for counterintelligence Richard Scott, and former head of public affairs at the bureau Michael Kortan. “Will subpoena them if necessary,” Goodlatte wrote.
Why the crush? In the House, one of the most significant powers that comes with a majority is the ability of committee chairmen to issue subpoenas. Goodlatte and Oversight Committee chairman Trey Gowdy are moving as fast as they can, knowing that Democrats stand a good chance of taking the House in the midterm elections.
What happens if Adam Schiff becomes chairman of House Intelligence, Elijah Cummings takes Oversight, and Jerrold Nadler helms the House Judiciary Committee? “Schiff is vowing to investigate Trump for money laundering if the House flips. Cummings says he’ll go after Trump for corruption, and Nadler says he’ll pursue campaign finance violations,” says a Republican aide involved in the Russia investigation. “Under Democrat control, it’s crystal clear that every House committee will open permanent investigations to find a pretext to impeach the president.”
Schiff has made it clear that a money-laundering investigation would focus on accusations about Trump and Russia: “There are serious and credible allegations the Russians may possess financial leverage over the president, including perhaps the laundering of Russian money through his businesses,” Schiff wrote in the Washington Post last week. “It would be negligent to our national security not to find out.” Needless to say, a House Intel Committee led by Adam Schiff will have very different priorities than the same committee led by Devin Nunes.
But what if, as polls suggest may happen, the GOP holds on to the upper chamber? Three Senate committees—Judiciary, Homeland Security, and Intelligence—have investigations of their own into the myriad issues raised by the Trump-Russia allegations. Aren’t they in a position to pull on any investigative threads left dangling if Republicans lose the House?
Yes and no. Senate committees have all the investigative powers that House committees do and often more experienced investigative staff. But Senate rules “delegate to the chair and ranking minority member together the power to authorize subpoenas,” in the words of the Congressional Research Service. Needing the buy-in of their ranking members to subpoena witnesses and documents, Senate committee chairmen are far more constrained than their House counterparts in what they can achieve unilaterally.
What will the investigative landscape look like if Republican efforts are focused in the Senate? Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley proved with the showdown over the nomination of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh that for all his folksy ways, he’s formidable in a knife fight, as Fred Barnes has noted in these pages (“Chuck Grassley’s Moment,” September 3, 2018). Judiciary has already done an admirably thorough and transparent investigation into Donald Jr.’s Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. And on the Fusion GPS front, Grassley not only secured the first congressional testimony by Simpson, he and Lindsey Graham together officially called for the Department of Justice to consider prosecuting dossier author Steele for lying to the FBI.
The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is doing its own oversight of the FBI, and committee chairman Ron Johnson has made it his mission to acquire key documents. FBI director Christopher Wray appeared before the committee this month, and Johnson pressed him on recent reports that during the 2016 campaign, the FBI’s top lawyer met with Michael Sussmann, a partner at Perkins Coie, the law firm that funneled payment from the Clinton campaign to Fusion GPS. In all his document requests, Johnson has pushed hard for unnecessary redactions to be removed.
Richard Burr heads the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, where partisan rancor has been noticeably absent. The committee produced this year, without fuss, the initial findings of its investigation into “Russian Targeting of Election Infrastructure.” The summary of the report stayed so far away from politics that it mentioned neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton.
Senate Intel may seem a little sleepy compared to its more combative counterparts, especially in the House. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t advanced knowledge of the Russia affair in important ways. Most of the other congressional committees with an interest in Fusion GPS’s efforts to spread the Trump/Russia collusion narrative have investigated Simpson’s and Steele’s extensive interactions with the FBI and the DoJ. By contrast, Burr’s committee has dug into Steele’s efforts during the election to spread his dossier around the State Department. Investigative staff looked through months of Foggy Bottom visitor logs and found that in the last days of the campaign, “Mr. Steele visited the State Department, briefing officials on the dossier in October 2016,” according to Burr.
And what of the investigations not run from Capitol Hill? Robert Mueller has shown no tolerance for FBI misbehavior in his shop (the special counsel sent former FBI agent Peter Strzok packing without hesitation) but has apparently shown little interest in investigating questions of whether the FBI or Department of Justice abused their powers in investigating candidate, then president, Trump. That is a mandate, however, of DoJ inspector general Michael Horowitz. The IG produced this summer an impressive and thorough report documenting “Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election.” Horowitz’s team is now looking at the controversial FISA warrant applications that allowed surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and at the FBI’s interactions with Steele. The inspector general’s inquiry is the least likely to be affected, either in content or timing, by the outcome of the midterms.
As for Mueller, speculation abounds (as always) about what he will do next and when. There are no few prognosticators predicting the special counsel will make some sort of move shortly after the midterm elections are over. Then again, he may not want to rush things.
