Nearly four years ago, President Barack Obama’s FBI and the Department of Justice sought to use secret counterintelligence tools in an unprecedented way to surveil an American citizen involved with an opposing party’s presidential campaign. It is now clear that the effort’s pivot point was an interview that remained classified for more than three years, and which should have brought an immediate end to both the court-authorized surveillance and the media narrative that President Trump was compromised by the Russian government.
There is simply no good faith argument to be made that the FBI reasonably believed its investigation into an alleged criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia should have continued after January 2017, when FBI agents interviewed Christopher Steele’s recently identified source, Igor Danchenko. After that interview, high-level FBI agents, as well as FBI and DOJ leadership, knew beyond all doubt that there was no “well-developed” conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. All investigations afterward, including the Mueller investigation, were political, had no criminal basis, and caused years of fear and loathing of Trump.
In October 2016, in the closing days of a divisive presidential campaign, the Obama administration’s FBI and DOJ sought a highly unusual surveillance warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which sits inside the DOJ in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. The warrant sought by the Obama administration targeted recent Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page, who had graduated with distinction from the U.S. Naval Academy and served as an intelligence officer in the Navy.
The secret court was created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 as a direct response to the misuse of government spying authorities by President Richard Nixon. It was designed to prevent the use of the intelligence community as a weapon against political enemies and, more particularly, to prevent the use of these secret authorities against American citizens in all but the most extraordinary matters.
In the warrant, the FBI and DOJ alleged that they had probable cause to believe both that Page was acting as an agent of Russia and that he was committing prosecutable criminal offenses under U.S. law. Specifically, they used the information provided by Igor Danchenko, a Ukrainian-born research analyst who had worked for years as a research analyst in Washington, D.C., to former British spy Christopher Steele to establish the probable cause necessary to surveil Page.
This information from Danchenko, whose identity remained closely guarded until this month, was represented to the FISA court as evidence that: Carter Page was “coordinating” with the Russian government to “illegally influence” the U.S. presidential election; that other Trump campaign officials were “perhaps” coordinating with Russia for the same purpose; that Page was engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with Russia; that Page had nefariously met with Russian Intelligence; that the Kremlin was “feeding information” to the Trump campaign for “an extended period of time;” that Page was the “intermediary” between Trump’s campaign manager and the “Russian leadership;” and that Page was acting “on behalf of the Russian government” to help candidate Trump.
In addition, the FBI included in the warrant application citations of various news articles that also accused various Trump campaign officials of covert and sinister ties to the Russian government. The FISA warrant was signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates before being signed by FISA court Judge Rosemary Collyer.
The warrant authorized surveillance, and though the exact type is still classified, it was likely electronic surveillance of ongoing emails, texts, and phone calls, as well as a “physical search,” which has never been defined publicly in this case. It expired on Jan. 13, 2017, just days before Trump was inaugurated.
Yates signed the renewal application on Jan. 12, 2017, which was substantially the same as the original application and which contained the same claims against Page and the Trump campaign as noted above. In the renewal, the FBI also claimed it needed to continue to surveil Page, both electronically and physically, in an ongoing effort to ferret out the Russian government’s desire to influence U.S. foreign policy.
Curiously, following the 90 day surveillance period during which the agency had access to his emails, texts, and phone calls, the renewal application made no claims of having uncovered even a single example of Page acting as an agent of Russia or as an intermediary between Russia and the Trump campaign. This surveillance effort would also have included surveillance of those with whom Page had contact. In other words, for 90 days, the FBI had access to the communications of every member of the Trump campaign with whom Page had ever communicated and in all that time found absolutely zero evidence to support the warrant’s claims.
This should have been a red flag to everyone, including then-FBI Director James Comey and Yates, who both signed off on the original warrant and the renewal application. After all, if, as they had alleged, there existed a “well-developed conspiracy,” one would expect that rifling through Page’s life, and that of Trump campaign personnel, would have turned up some piece of independent evidence to support it.
One other curious detail inside the renewal application was the FBI’s continued vouching for the reliability of Christopher Steele and his “dossier” information. This was done in spite of the agency’s discovery prior to January 2017 that Steele had lied to its agents and was, in opposition to the claims in the original FISA, in fact, a source for media reporting about connections between Trump and Russia (see page 25).
One other claim inside the first FISA renewal seems to prove, Yates’s recent Senate testimony notwithstanding, that it was ultimately Trump campaign officials’ electronic communications that the FBI was targeting with the original warrant and the renewal. In the renewal application, the FBI noted that Page had traveled to Russia in December 2016, a time within the original warrant period and during which Page was subject to extraordinary surveillance.
After the election, claims that Page was acting as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and Russia raised the specter that the newly elected president was an asset of Putin and the Russian government. Nonetheless, the FBI reported to the court that they had “no specific reporting on Page’s activities during his international travel,” showing an astonishing lack of concern about this supposed Russian co-conspirator traveling to Russia, presumably to continue the conspiracy. The lack of physical surveillance, or any reporting on who Page met with while in Russia, shows he was merely a cut-out. The target of the entire FISA scheme was the Trump campaign, and Page was merely the easiest channel.
Even if one can argue that the FBI had support for its belief in Page’s well-developed conspiracy with Russia on behalf of the Trump campaign, the entire Crossfire Hurricane sham should have come to a crashing end four days after Trump was inaugurated. That is when the FBI began a three-day interview with Danchenko, Steele’s primary source of the information.
Setting aside questions of why the FBI waited months after the initial FISA application, and more than a week after the renewal application, to interview Steele’s primary sub-source, Danchenko’s interview certainly should have put an end to Page’s surveillance and to Crossfire Hurricane itself. Danchenko’s information showed clearly that any reliance upon the Steele dossier in the Page warrants was not only misplaced but should have driven the FBI and DOJ to seek to prosecute Steele for lying to them in a way that was obviously material to their investigation.
Danchenko told the agents and lawyers that Steele’s attribution by and about him were wildly wrong in several respects, including that he was not, in fact, based in Russia and that he has never had any contact with Russian intelligence officials. These facts call into serious question the reliability of Steele’s explosive conclusions about Page and the Trump campaign. Steele himself, reportedly a former MI6 spy, should have known that Danchenko’s information was anything but reliable, but he continuously pushed it as having come from his own “network” of Russian sources. In fact, the network was Danchenko’s and was itself unreliable.
Steele’s dossier reporting, which, again, was cited in the Page FISA application, claimed that Page met on multiple occasions with high-level Russian officials. Steele was not a witness to these meetings, nor was Danchenko. Rather, it was “sub sources” of Danchenko’s who made the claims. These different sources did not even claim to witness the meetings, but they told Danchenko that a “contact” of theirs confirmed the meetings. There was no independent support for it, yet it became part of the foundational narrative that Page was engaged with Russia on behalf of the Trump campaign.
This hearsay from the FBI, Steele, Danchenko, Danchenko’s sources, and those source’s contacts, represents something like fifth-degree removal from the alleged events. This would never satisfy the criminal evidentiary requirements in this country, nor should it. And it should not have satisfied the Obama FBI’s suspicions, which led to a military veteran and adviser to a Republican political campaign to have the full power of the government’s surveillance tactics brought to bear against them both.
In the series of Danchenko interviews, the FBI and DOJ team also learned that Danchenko really trusted one of his sub-sources, who claimed Page was meeting with high-level Russian officials, noting he trusted her “100%” (see page 28). However, it was this same source who claimed Trump attorney Michael Cohen flew to Prague in the summer of 2016 to meet with Russians, an obvious red flag if true. But this claim, like the others, was completely false, as the Mueller report noted. Therefore, Danchenko, Steele, the FBI, DOJ, and the FISA court were relying on a source wholly unreliable. There is a reason hearsay is not admissible in criminal court.
As soon as the government learned that Steele’s primary source for his reporting could not verify one single claim in the dossier used for the Page FISA warrant, the warrant should have been withdrawn and the entire Crossfire Hurricane investigation ended. The agents and DOJ lawyers at the Danchenko debriefings surely reported to their respective leadership that the dossier was not only shaky but demonstrably false in large measure.
Still, those same leaders, Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Rod Rosenstein, among them, all allowed the fiction of Crossfire Hurricane to continue to leak out and damage president Trump and also to tear our country apart. The president’s first three years were hamstrung by these false allegations, and those in charge of our law enforcement and intelligence assets have yet to answer for their failures. If we had honest leadership at FBI and DOJ in January 2017, it could have been a true pivot point for this country. Instead, nearly four years later, not a single person has been held to account for the violations of duty to law, order, and the Constitution. Justice is, hopefully, coming.
Francey Hakes (@FranceyHakes) is a former state and federal prosecutor who previously worked in the Department of Justice and practiced in front of the FISA court. She co-hosts the crime podcast Best Case Worst Case.
