Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani slammed former FBI Director James Comey over his handling of the unverified dossier, which was used in FISA applications targeting former Trump campaign associate Carter Page, compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele.
“How come it was unverified for five months when he was FBI director? Hey jackass, you had five months,” Giuliani said in a lengthy radio interview with Howie Carr on Tuesday.
The dossier was used in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act filings beginning in October 2016 through June 2017, and Comey signed off on three of the four submissions to the Foreign Surveillance Court before he was fired in May 2017. Comey personally briefed Trump on some of the most salacious allegations in January 2017.
“I would love to cross-examine him,” Giuliani said of Comey.
Giuliani pointed to newly released notes from an Oct. 11, 2016, meeting between Steele and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec, which he said cast doubt on the reliability of Steele’s dossier and called into question the information provided to the court in the FISA application that was submitted later that month. The notes, which Kavalec is believed to have emailed to the FBI in mid-October, indicate that Steele knew he had been hired by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee and had been told they wanted his findings made public prior to the 2016 election.
The notes also show that Kavalec believed at least some of Steele’s allegations to be false. She said Steele alleged that, as part of Russia’s 2016 election interference efforts, there was a “significant Russian network in the U.S. run by the Russian Embassy that draws on emigres to do hacking and recruiting” and “payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami.” But, as Kavalec pointed out, “it is important to note that there is no Russian Consulate in Miami.”
“I guarantee you one of those memos [from Kavalec] went to Jim Comey. The FBI was notified — she would not have notified the FBI that she found the Steele affidavit to be exceedingly questionable,” Giuliani said.
Giuliani said Kavalec’s notes were damning and Comey and the FBI had not done their due diligence in verifying the dossier’s allegations before using it. “I mean, an Assistant Secretary of State, who is not a law enforcement professional, read the Steele affidavit at the same time as the director of our FBI. And she came to the conclusion that it was an unverified piece of junk and put out a memo to that effect,” he said.
Giuliani said the dossier was “written like it’s a National Enquirer story” and claimed that anyone who saw it should have immediately been skeptical. He pointed to his past experiences as an investigator and prosecutor, saying that “when I got something questionable like that, you verify what you can verify.”
Giuliani said that figuring out whether the Russians were making payments out of a Miami consulate would have been easy to do. “You call up the State Department and they tell you we don’t have a Russian consulate in Miami,” he said. Giuliani also said that the FBI could have verified whether or not former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had actually gone to Prague, noting that if they had simply “called the passport office” then “you would find out he didn’t and that he’s never been to Prague.”
Allegations in the Steele dossier included that Cohen traveled to Prague to meet with Kremlin-connected figures and foreign hackers, but special counsel Robert Mueller’s report concluded that Cohen had not been to Prague.
At a CNN town hall last Thursday, Comey defended the way that he and the FBI had handled Steele’s information. He asserted “the most important part” of the dossier was related to “Russians coming for the American election,” which he asserted was “consistent with our other intelligence” and “true.”
And during an event at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., on Friday, former FBI General Counsel James Baker also defended the FBI’s use of the Steele dossier. He said the FBI was careful in the way it used Steele’s reporting. “We have an obligation to take that information seriously and to be highly skeptical … You go to work … You try to validate it … We don’t just swallow it hook, line, and sinker … We spent a lot of time trying to vet that information line by line,” Baker said.
Steele has come under increased scrutiny in recent weeks. According to a New York Times report in April, the FBI reached out to some of Steele’s foreign sources in an attempt to determine their credibility, and as early as January 2017 agents had concluded that some of the dossier’s contents may have been based on “rumors and hearsay” which were “passed from source to source.” The agents also believed some of Steele’s information may have been based on “Russian disinformation.” The Wall Street Journal reported that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz “is homing in on” and “has been asking witnesses about” the FBI’s “treatment of information” provided by Steele.
There are at least three federal investigations into alleged FISA abuse and other matters related to the way that the FBI and DOJ handled the Trump-Russia investigation. Horowitz is expected to finish his investigation in either May or June, U.S. Attorney John Huber was tasked with this responsibility by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions back in 2018, and U.S. Attorney John Durham has reportedly been selected by Attorney General William Barr to look into the origins of the Russia inquiry.
