A top Republican on the House Oversight Committee predicted on Sunday that the highly anticipated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse report from the Justice Department’s inspector general will be released later than expected due to new developments.
On Fox News Rep. Mark Meadows told “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo that he is “not as optimistic now” after Attorney General William Barr said he anticipated Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigation to be complete by early June.
Horowitz and his team have been investigating alleged FISA abuse by the Justice Department and the FBI since March 2018. The inquiry includes a focus on the FBI’s handling of the unverified dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele and its extensive use in the FBI’s FISA applications and renewals to target former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Barr said in April that Horowitz would be wrapped up “in probably May or June” but an end-of-the-month deadline looks increasingly unlikely.
“Only Michael Horowitz knows the exact time frame of when it’s coming out. Obviously the attorney general indicated that he hoped to see it in June. I’m not as optimistic now,” Meadows said on Sunday. “One of the reasons for that is additional information has been given to the inspector general for them to investigate.”
One significant piece of new potential information could be Steele’s interest in being interviewed by Horowitz’s team. Steele has conditions for an interview, including that the inspector general’s team needs to come to London, where he lives and runs his private investigative firm Orbis Business Intelligence, they can only focus on his relationship with the FBI, for whom he was a confidential source, and the U.S. has to get permission from the U.K. government first.
As recently as April it was reported that Steele declined to meet with Horowitz’s team due to concerns about being undermined. Although he has apparently come around to speaking with Horowitz, Steele still appears dead set against meeting with officials connected to Barr’s own investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation, led by U.S. Attorney John Durham.
Steele was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was itself being paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm. The fact that the dossier had Democratic funding was not revealed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Meadows stressed that his prediction about Horowitz’s inquiry was just his own opinion based on the reports he has seen. “I can tell you Inspector Horowitz obviously hasn’t communicated that to my knowledge to anybody on Capitol Hill,” the North Carolina congressman said. “But based on what I’m seeing in terms of additional information being shared with him I think it’ll be a while.”
