The Justice Department inspector general’s investigation of potential abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is complete, a Republican congressman said, though a report on its findings might not be released for a month.
House Judiciary Committee member John Ratcliffe of Texas said Monday he’d met with DOJ watchdog Michael Horowitz about his FISA abuse report last week. Ratcliffe said in a Fox News interview they’d discussed the timing, but not the content of his report and Horowitz “related that his team’s investigative work is complete and they’re now in the process of drafting that report.”
“I would expect that a draft of that would be completed in short order,” Ratcliffe said.
The DOJ inspector general’s investigation, launched in March 2018, has centered on whether the FBI and DOJ filing of four FISA applications and renewals beginning in October 2016 to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was abuse of the FISA process. The applications relied heavily upon an unverified dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who was hired by Fusion GPS. The opposition research firm was hired by Marc Elias of the Perkins Coie law firm at the behest of the Clinton presidential campaign.
Ratcliffe said he was doubtful that Horowitz’s report would be made available to the public or the Congress anytime soon.
“He did relay that as much as 20% of his report is going to include classified information, so that draft report will have to undergo a classification review at the FBI and at the Department of Justice,” Ratcliffe said. “So, while I’m hopeful that we members of Congress might see it before the August recess, I’m not too certain about that.”
Horowitz’s last high-profile probe, which looked into the handling of the Clinton email investigation by the DOJ and FBI, resulted in a 568-page tome released in June 2018.
Ratcliffe said Monday that he believed Horowitz’s findings will be significant and that the report likely presents a problem for Democrats.
“Right now we already know Bob Mueller — Bob Mueller has told us — that a Democratic administration started an investigation into a conspiracy with Russia that didn’t exist. That’s bad enough. It would be a whole lot worse if it turns out that that same Democratic administration continued that investigation by breaking rules at the FISA Court,” Ratcliffe said.
Ratcliffe said that if Horowitz concludes that the FISA process was indeed abused then “you can pretty much put a pin in any impeachment balloon, because it’d be hard for the Democrats to say that they started an investigation that they shouldn’t have, and that they continued it by breaking the rules, but they want to impeach a president for trying to obstruct that investigation that never should’ve started.”
Horowitz had reportedly been “homing in” on Steele for months, and sources close to Steele expressed his willingness to meet with Horowitz in June.
It’s not just Republican members of Congress who have cast doubt on Steele’s dossier. Watergate journalist Bob Woodward has been calling it “garbage” for more than two years, and former CIA Moscow station chief Daniel Hoffman told the Washington Examiner that “I called what bullshit the dossier was a year and a half ago … It’s likely FSB [the successor agency to the KGB] disinformation.”
A number of Steele’s biggest claims — including the allegation stemming from “Kremlin insiders” that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had met in Prague with Putin associates and foreign hackers — were knocked down by special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
Horowitz had reportedly been “homing in” on Steele for months, and sources close to Steele expressed his willingness to meet with Horowitz in June.
Other possible targets of the DOJ inspector general inquiry likely included the approvers and signers of the four FISA warrant applications and renewals from October 2016 through June 2017, including former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and the former Acting Attorney General and now current FBI General Counsel Dana Boente, the only signer of a Page FISA application who is still in office.
A federal lawsuit was recently filed by a conservative legal group to attempt to compel the Federal Elections Commission to rule on allegations that the Clinton campaign and the DNC broke campaign rules by allegedly hiding payments that were made to Fusion GPS.
