What exactly does it mean for the FBI to suspend its relationship with a source? What does it mean when that relationship has been “closed”? The answers to those questions may provide insight into whether the FBI and Department of Justice, in their applications for surveillance warrants against Carter Page, were fully forthcoming with the secret federal court that considers such requests.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act documents released on July 21 after a FOIA lawsuit from USA Today show the government informing the court that the FBI had “suspended its relationship” with Christopher Steele. Steele is the former British spy who was the Justice Department’s “Source #1” for its warrant applications targeting Carter Page. FISA warrants must be renewed every 90 days, and in the first such renewal filing with the court in January 2017, it was revealed that the suspension came after Steele was caught talking to the press, which the FBI had told him not to do.
The FISA filing explains at length why Steele felt driven to break his word: In late October, FBI director James Comey had “sent a letter to the U.S. Congress, which stated that the FBI had learned of new information that might be pertinent to an investigation that the FBI was conducting of Candidate #2.” That would be the inquiry into Hillary Clinton and her emails. Comey’s action made Steele mad: “Source #1 told the FBI that he/she was frustrated with this action and believed it would likely influence the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.”
“In response to Source #1’s concerns,” reads the January 2017 FISA renewal, “Source #1 independently, and against the prior admonishment from the FBI to speak only with the FBI on this matter, released the reporting discussed herein to an identified news organization.” Steele had actually been briefing multiple news outlets on his dossier since September 2016, but it was this late October conversation with Mother Jones that got him into trouble.
“Although the FBI continues to assess Source #1’s reporting is reliable,” the bureau states in the January renewal, “the FBI has suspended its relationship with Source #1 because of this disclosure.” And that’s that for the warrant application’s discussion of Steele.
One might think from this that Steele was a spy left out in the cold. But he wasn’t quite the non-grata persona that the warrant application suggests. Indeed, Steele continued to feed his allegations to the FBI—just not directly. The bureau continued to consume those allegations and went to great lengths to deal with Steele without directly talking with him.
Steele found a go-between through whom to maintain contact with the FBI: senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife Nellie Ohr, a Fusion GPS employee, was working with Steele on his dossier. (The dossier work had been contracted by Fusion GPS, which in turn was paid by law firm Perkins Coie; the law firm has acknowledged that the money came from the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign.)
Bruce Ohr met repeatedly with Steele. The Justice Department has already turned over to Senate investigators “63 pages of unclassified emails and notes documenting Mr. Ohr’s interactions with Mr. Steele.” Those materials have yet to be released.
But what we do know is that Ohr passed the details of his conversations with Steele on to the FBI. Ohr’s communications with the bureau weren’t merely informal chats. They were formal FBI interviews, each subsequently written up in a “302” summary memo. We know this from a detailed letter sent by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley to deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and FBI director Christopher Wray in early July.
The FBI conducted at least a dozen such interviews with Ohr. The first we know about took place November 22, 2016—just weeks after Steele was caught breaking FBI rules regarding the press. That was followed by interviews December 5 and 12. Those three interviews were summarized by the FBI in a 302 produced December 19.
The FBI interviewed Ohr about Steele’s stories again the next day, December 20, an interview memorialized in a 302 dated December 27. And it went on into 2017, with the FBI listening to Steele allegations by way of Ohr three times in January (the 23rd, 25th, and 27th), twice in February (the 6th and 14th), and then three times in May (the 8th, 12th, and 15th).
In April 2017, Justice filed a second renewal of its warrant application against Page. This time, the FBI claimed something more definitive about its relationship with Steele: He hadn’t just been “suspended.” After repeating the detail about “Source #1’s unauthorized disclosure of information to the press” (which had happened back in October), the FBI makes this unequivocal statement in the second renewal application (the emphatic underlining is in the original): “Subsequently, the FBI closed Source #1 as an FBI source.”
And yet all the while, the FBI was using an interlocutor (one with a serious conflict of interest) to continue its conversations with Steele.
Asked about Steele’s suspension and subsequent “closure” as a source, a spokesman for the FBI said that the bureau has no comment.
In the spirit of transparency, Grassley asked in his letter that Justice declassify the Ohr 302s and produce them to the Judiciary Committee by July 20.
The senator is still waiting.
