A top Democrat said the FBI’s use of the unverified Steele dossier, which may contain foreign disinformation, in its investigations is different from President Trump’s willingness to hear opposition research from foreign sources.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told the Washington Examiner it was wrong for supporters of the president to respond to Trump saying last week that “there’s nothing wrong with listening” to information from a foreign government during a campaign by comparing that with the Democratic National Committee-funded Fusion GPS hiring British ex-spy Christopher Steele to compile a dossier using Kremlin sources during the presidential election.
“I think this is an illustration of a tactic that the administration and its allies often use — which is the argument of false equivalence,” Schiff said at the National Press Club on Wednesday.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was one of many Republicans to weigh in last week. While saying that any campaign should reject foreign help and go to the FBI if they’re approached with foreign dirt, Graham also brought up concerns about foreign influence related to the Clinton campaign and Fusion GPS.
“During that [2016] race, we had a major American political party hire a foreign national, Christopher Steele, to dig up dirt on an American presidential candidate,” Graham said.
The unverified 2016 dossier, which former intelligence officials have said may have contained Russian disinformation, was used by the FBI in its investigations and in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications targeting former Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
When asked if he considers the dossier to be foreign influence in any way, Schiff said he didn’t think there’s “any equivalence between hiring an American opposition research firm — even one that hires a former British intelligence officer to do some of its opposition research — and having direct contact with people in the Russian government to get dirt on your opponent as part of what’s described as that foreign nation’s effort to help your campaign.”
“That seems to me very different qualitatively and far more problematic,” Schiff said, describing efforts to compare the two as “whataboutism.”
At a hearing on the Mueller report in front of Schiff’s committee last week, the two Democratic witnesses — both former heads of the FBI’s National Security Branch — said that they’d never before heard of political opposition research being used in FISA applications prior to the Steele dossier.
On Wednesday, Schiff also defended the Clinton campaign’s hiring of Fusion GPS and the firm’s hiring of Steele. Although Schiff acknowledged that “there are rules about what role foreign nationals can play in any campaign” he then brought up the Trump campaign hiring British firm Cambridge Analytica, and said that was much worse.
“The closer analogy is the Trump campaign’s use of Cambridge Analytica and its employment of foreign nationals at Cambridge Analytica and whether those foreign nationals were exercising a degree of control in the campaign that violated the campaign prohibition on the use of foreign nationals,” Schiff said.
And Schiff claimed that “in the case of the DNC and Fusion GPS, they appear to have abided by the rules” while “in the case of Cambridge Analytica, it appears they violated the rules.”
A Federal Election Commission complaint filed in October 2017 charges the Clinton campaign filed inaccurate expenditure reports related to Fusion GPS, but it does not appear that the FEC has ruled on the complaint.
Former top FBI officials such as FBI Director James Comey, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and FBI General Counsel James Baker have all defended the FBI’s handling of the Steele dossier and its use in FISA applications in recent weeks.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has been looking into alleged FISA abuse, with a specific focus on Steele and the FBI, since March 2018. And Attorney General William Barr, along with his right-hand man U.S. Attorney John Durham, recently launched a broader investigation of the investigators, with a focus on the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia probe.
Overall, Schiff dismissed concerns that Republicans had about the relationship between the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele, and the FBI.
“I think this is yet another effort to deflect and blur the distinctions and say, ‘Well, everybody does it.’ Everybody doesn’t do it. When the president says that, I think he is merely projecting his own lack of ethics onto others, which we have seen repeatedly,” he said.
