The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said his requests for interviews with two FBI officials who interviewed a key subsource for British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier have been denied by the bureau.
Sen. Lindsey Graham also hinted at jail time for any Justice Department or FBI officials who knew about flaws in Steele’s dossier while the bureau used it in the pursuit of surveillance warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
“I made a request to interview the case agent and the intel analyst, and there were two other people, who interviewed the subsource for three days in January, again in March, again in May, and they’re denying me the ability to do that,” the South Carolina Republican said on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures. “But why did they run all these stop signs? The question is, did the case agent and the intel agent refuse to tell the system about exculpatory information? Does the fault lie with two or three people? Or was it a system out of control?”
The agent and the analyst met with the alleged subsource for Steele multiple times in early 2017, and the person denied the veracity of several assertions in the former MI6 agent’s dossier.
Graham said he was “going to keep working the system.” He also praised Attorney General William Barr as “the most transparent attorney general in my lifetime” while saying that former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell “released a lot of information.” The senator is currently seeking the authority to subpoena as many as 53 figures involved with the Trump-Russia case, including those FBI and DOJ officials who met with Steele’s subsource.
A person familiar with the Senate Judiciary Committee’s work told the Washington Examiner that “the FBI is unjustifiably refusing to make nonsenior executive service employees available, thus making it very difficult to get to the bottom of what happened.” The FBI declined to comment.
Graham asked in April for all records related to the FBI’s interviews with Steele’s primary subsource in January, March, and May 2017, including the “lengthy written summary” of a January 2017 interview written by FBI agents dubbed “Supervisory Intel Analyst” and “Case Agent 1.” He also asked for the two-page “Intelligence Memorandum” provided to Crossfire Hurricane leader Bill Priestap by the analyst in late 2017, which discussed “aspects of the Primary Sub-source’s interview” that raised red flags about Steele.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s lengthy December report criticized the DOJ and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Page and for the bureau’s reliance on Steele’s unverified dossier. Steele put his research together at the behest of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm. Declassified footnotes showed the FBI was aware that Steele’s dossier may have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
Horowitz said FBI interviews with Steele’s primary Moscow-based source “raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting” and cast doubt on some of its biggest claims. The DOJ watchdog’s report said Steele’s dossier included information from a subsource who was said to be “close” to President Trump. Steele told DOJ investigators that this subsource provided the person described as his “Primary Sub-source” with information and that this subsource met with the primary subsource two or three times.
Stephen Somma, a counterintelligence investigator in the FBI’s New York field office, is believed to be “Case Agent 1.” Horowitz has said he was “primarily responsible for some of the most significant errors and omissions” in the Page FISA warrant applications.
Steele’s dossier claims to have a source described as a “close associate of Trump” and attributes to him some of the more salacious allegations about Trump, including the claim about Trump and prostitutes at a hotel during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, as well as the assertion of a “well-developed conspiracy” between Trump and Russia.
Horowitz described “Person 1” as a “key Steele sub-source” who was attributed with providing information in Steele’s dossier. Recently declassified footnotes said an intelligence document circulated among members of the Crossfire Hurricane team in early October 2016 that showed “Person 1″ had “historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to [Russian Intelligence Services].” The document reported “Person 1″ “was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer.”
Graham also made clear on Sunday his intentions to call former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to testify after former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified last week. The senator said, “The Russian subsource disavowed the reliability of the Steele dossier” among other FISA flaws, such as a key email being altered to make it seem like Page was “not a source” for the CIA when he was, and said that if any top leadership knew about it, they may face prison time.
“So, I will call McCabe. I find it hard to believe that McCabe and Comey did not know that the Russian subsource told the FBI in January, ‘Oh, by the way, the documents you’re using to get a warrant against Carter Page, the Steele dossier, it’s a bunch of hearsay, bar talk, and garbage,’” Graham said. “That’s why they will eventually be called before the committee.”
Graham said he believed wrongdoing wasn’t committed just by a few low-level people.
“We’re not going to let the system blame some low-level intel analyst or case agent for defrauding the court. I believe it goes up to the very top. … Jail time would lie with anybody who had knowledge that the Russian dossier — the subsource disavowed the Steele dossier,” Graham said. “So, we’re going to find out what happened. And I’m not going to let these people blame some low-level agent or intel analyst unless that’s the truth, and I don’t think it is the truth.”
