Robert Mueller told the House Intelligence Committee he was not involved in approving the fourth and final Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Trump associate Carter Page, which occurred in June 2017, the month after he’d been appointed to be the special counsel in May 2017.
The FISA applications targeting Page required the approval of top members of the FBI, the DOJ, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and the current and former government officials involved will likely face tough questions over their actions from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who has been looking into alleged FISA abuse since March 2018. There was some speculation that Mueller, as special counsel, may have been involved.
Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, pointed out to Mueller that the original Page FISA warrant was “reupped three times” and that “he last time it was reupped was under your watch.” And so Nunes wanted to know if Mueller was “in the approval process of that last time.”
“I can’t speak specifically about that warrant, but if you ask was I in the approval chain?” Mueller responded. “The answer is no.”
The October 2016 FISA application and January 2017 FISA renewal were both approved by then-FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. The April 2017 FISA renewal was approved by Comey and by Dana Boente, who is the only signatory still in active government service, working as the Trump administration’s top lawyer at the FBI starting in January 2018. The June 2017 FISA renewal was approved by McCabe and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
The 412 pages of redacted FISA documents released in 2018 show that the DOJ and FBI made extensive use of an unverified dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele which made a series of allegations regarding Trump and Russia. Steele put his research together in 2016 at the behest of Fusion GPS, which had been hired by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm. The fact that Steele received funding from a Democratic presidential campaign was not revealed to the FISA Court, which has been an immense source of concern for GOP investigators.
Horowitz, whose team reportedly interviewed Steele in June, is expected to release his report by the fall.
Meanwhile, Attorney General William Barr — along with U.S. Attorney John Durham — is engaged in his own broader inquiry into the actions taken to launch and carry out the Trump-Russia investigation.
