A top Senate Republican is demanding information from FBI Director Christopher Wray about a 2018 briefing in which he believes the bureau gave misleading information to the Senate Intelligence Committee about the reliability of British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s anti-Trump dossier.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a two-page letter on Tuesday seeking details about the briefing to the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee related to Steele’s primary subsource, recently revealed to be Russian-trained, D.C.-based lawyer Igor Danchenko, who the FBI knew by then had undermined the credibility of many of Steele’s Trump-Russia allegations following multiple interviews with him in early 2017. Graham told Wray he wanted answers by Friday, including the name and position of the bureau’s briefer, of all the FBI officials who attended the briefing, and of all the bureau employees involved in putting together the now-declassified draft taking points.
The South Carolina Republican also asked Wray, who took over for fired FBI Director James Comey in 2017, to hand over all of the documents and communications used by the FBI to brief Congress about the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the Steele dossier, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications targeting onetime Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
Graham said the newly declassified FBI document appears to claim misleadingly that Danchenko “did not cite any significant concerns with the way his reporting was characterized in the dossier to the extent he could identify it,” that “at minimum, our discussions with [the Primary Sub-source] confirm that the dossier was not fabricated by Steele,” and that the primary subsource “maintains trusted relationships with individuals who are capable of reporting on the material he collected for Steele.” Graham said that “each of these statements is clearly inaccurate” based on information uncovered through the senator’s inquiry and by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s Page FISA investigation.
“The FBI knew each of these statements was inaccurate at the time they were included in the outline for the briefing,” Graham said.
“The result of those interviews was that the Primary Sub-source largely discredited the dossier and the way that Steele reported and characterized the information the Primary Sub-source had given him,” Graham told Wray, adding, “What is particularly troubling about this [2018] briefing is that the outline of the briefing indicates that at least three material misrepresentations regarding the Primary Sub-source and what he told the FBI about the Steele dossier in 2017 were made to the committee.”
FBI notes of an interview conducted with Danchenko in January 2017 show he told the bureau that he didn’t know where some of the claims attributed to him came from and that his Russian sources never mentioned some of the allegations in Steele’s dossier. Danchenko was multiple steps separated from some claims he passed to Steele.
Danchenko told bureau agents he “did not know the origins” of some claims and “did not recall” other information in the dossier. Steele’s primary subsource told the FBI that Steele mischaracterized at least one of his own Russian source contacts too. Danchenko noted that much of what he gave to Steele was “word of mouth and hearsay,” some stemmed from a “conversation that [he] had with friends over beers,” and the most salacious Trump allegations may have been made in “jest.”
The Steele subsource told the FBI that Steele contracted him to look into Trump associates, and he then reached out to his own loose source network of some shady individuals and old friends from Russia. He also contradicted some of the claims in Steele’s dossier.
Horowitz said FBI interviews with Steele’s primary subsource “raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting” and cast doubt on some of its biggest claims. The DOJ watchdog noted the primary subsource “made statements during his/her January 2017 FBI interview that were inconsistent with multiple sections of the Steele reports, including some that were relied upon in the FISA applications” and that Danchenko’s account “was not consistent with and, in fact, contradicted the allegations of a ‘well-developed conspiracy’” in Steele’s dossier.
The DOJ watchdog also said the FISA renewals “continued to rely on the Steele information, without any revisions or notice to the court that the Primary Sub-source contradicted the Steele election reporting on key issues described in the renewal applications.”
Horowitz’s report noted Steele “was not the originating source of any of the factual information in his reporting.” Horowitz said that “neither Steele nor the Primary Sub-source had direct access to the information being reported.”
Horowitz’s lengthy December report criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA warrants against Page and for the bureau’s reliance on Steele’s Democratic-funded and unverified dossier. Declassified footnotes now show the FBI was aware that Steele’s dossier might have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson recently subpoenaed Wray for documents related to the Trump-Russia investigation and the Trump presidential transition. Developments from U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation of the Trump-Russia investigators are expected by the end of summer.
