Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, reached out to the FBI asking whether the agency provided “defensive briefings” to the Trump campaign in response to Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 election in a manner similar to how then-candidate John McCain’s campaign was reportedly alerted during the 2008 presidential campaign.
In a letter dated Sept. 20 and made public a day later, Grassley said that regardless of whether the FBI followed this supposed precedent with the Trump campaign he wanted answers.
“If the FBI did provide a defensive briefing or similar warning to the [Trump] campaign, then that would raise important questions about how the Trump campaign responded,” Grassley wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray. “On the other hand, if the FBI did not alert the campaign, then that would raise serious questions about what factors contributed to its decision and why it appears to have been handled differently in a very similar circumstance involving a previous campaign.”
Grassley noted in his letter that then-FBI Director James Comey testified before the House Intelligence Committee in March that his agency began in late July of 2016 an investigation into “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government.” After he was fired, Comey told the Senate intelligence panel that Trump was not a subject of the probe.
Grassley singled out former campaign manager Paul Manafort because he is reportedly one of the campaign associates under FBI investigation — just this week it was reported that he was the target of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act monitoring by the Obama administration in 2016 as he led the Trump campaign — and because he has ties to Sen. John McCain’s former campaign manager, Rick Davis.
Manafort and Davis, who was Manafort’s business partner at the time, reportedly came under scrutiny for their work at the time on behalf of Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who was backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Citing old reports, Grassley said that Davis, as McCain’s campaign manager, had arranged for the candidate to meet with Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, the same oligarch whom Manafort reportedly offered “private briefings” to about the Trump campaign.
“According to John Weaver, a former top campaign advisor to Senator McCain: ‘My sense is that Davis and Manafort, who were already doing pro-Putin work against American national interests, were using potential meetings with McCain — who didn’t know this and neither did we until after the fact — as bait to secure more rubles from the oligarchs,'” the letter said.
“Mr. Weaver further stated that ‘U.S. intelligence raised concerns to McCain’s staff about the Davis Manafort work,'” the letter continued. “A recent report quoted an anonymous U.S. counterintelligence official who had been involved as saying: ‘Before there was Trump, there were concerns about some of the same people being around McCain about 10 years ago, and we alerted his team to those concerns and they appeared to take some defensive action.'”
The letter also mentions that after McCain’s “inner circle” was warned by U.S. intelligence about an adviser with suspected ties to the Russian military, this person was asked to leave.
The McCain team has pushed back against the reports about defensive briefings.
“Neither Senator McCain nor anyone on his staff recalls receiving such warnings from the intelligence community. Senator McCain had two interactions with Mr. Deripaska in 2006, and both were social occasions and entirely incidental,” said McCain’s spokeswoman Julie Tarallo, who then flaunted McCain’s hawkish stance on Russia. “No member of Congress has done more to push back on Russian aggression, human rights abuses, and corruption than Senator John McCain. Any suggestion to the contrary is clearly intended to distract from the serious ongoing investigations into Russia’s interference in our election system,” she added, according to CNN.
Still, Grassley stressed that these reports, if they are true, show the importantance of campaigns being briefed when a threat is detected.
“Such briefings are one of the tools that the FBI often uses to thwart attempts by foreign intelligence services to infiltrate organizations or compromise U.S. citizens,” he wrote. “Such a briefing allows innocent, unwitting organizations and individuals to take defensive action to protect themselves.”
Grassley asked that Wray reply to his committee by Oct. 4.
Grassley’s panel is one of a handful looking into Russian interference and the firing of Comey as FBI director. He subpoenaed Manafort back in July only to retract it after Manafort agreed to hand over documents and continue talks about setting up an interview.
Manafort has spoken privately with the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of its investigation into Russia’s election interference. The topic of that discussion was reportedly about a meeting Manafort participated in with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower during the campaign with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Grassley said this week that his committee might refrain from issuing another subpoena depending on whether special counsel Robert Mueller indicts Manafort as a part of his own investigation into Russian meddling and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
