Two former top FBI officials whom Democrats brought in as congressional witnesses for a hearing Wednesday on counterintelligence lessons to be learned from the Mueller report both admitted they’d never read the Steele dossier.
The two also testified that they had never heard of political opposition research being used in an FBI counterintelligence investigation prior to the Steele dossier.
Both left the FBI prior to the Trump-Russia investigation.
Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, asked the three witnesses present if they were familiar with the dossier.
Stephanie Douglas, a former executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, said, “I’ve never read the Steele dossier.”
“I’ve not read it either, sir,” said Robert Anderson, also a former executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch.
Both were invited by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
The third witness, Andrew McCarthy, quipped “I’ve read it!” to some laughter from the assembled.
McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York who had been invited by committee Republicans, has written about it at length.
The series of reports put together by British ex-spy Christopher Steele was compiled during 2016 and Steele had pushed it not just to the FBI but throughout the U.S. government, and had made efforts to provide it to a number of journalists as well.
BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier in January 2017 following reports that the intelligence community had briefed Trump, then president-elect, on its existence.
Steele created his dossier after he was hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which itself was receiving funding through the Clinton campaign and the DNC via the Perkins Coie law firm.
Many of the allegations found within the salacious dossier remain unverified, and some of them, such as accusations that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen was in Prague in the summer of 2016 to meet with shady foreign hackers, seem to have been proven false in the report.
The dossier was used in four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications and renewals targeting former Trump campaign associate Carter Page beginning in October 2016.
Stewart pressed the former government officials on whether it was typical for this sort of potentially politically motivated information to find its way into an FBI probe.
“Has the FBI ever used political opposition research funded by a U.S. political campaign — and including information for foreign agents — in a counterintelligence investigation? Are you aware of that ever happening before?” he asked.
The two former FBI officials said they’d never heard of something like that happening before the Steele dossier.
“I’m not aware of anything. It doesn’t mean it hasn’t potentially happened before, but I’m not aware,” Anderson said.
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.
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.
McCarthy said the problem wasn’t the source of the information but rather whether there had been an effort to assess its truthfulness.
“I’ve taken information from the worst people on the planet. I’ve taken information from terrorists, from murderers, from swindlers. When you do this kind of work, the people that you get information from tend not to be great people,” McCarthy said. “The question is, what do you do with the information when you get it? The more suspect the source of the information is, the higher your obligation is to verify it before you use it in any way that’s going to intrude on anyone’s rights.”
McCarthy said that it seemed like the FBI had treated Steele like a source, but that in his view Steele was acting more as an “accumulator” of information from other sources, saying that “in this equation he’s much more like a case agent than a source.”
“Generally speaking, for prosecutors in courts in any warrant situation, whether it’s a FISA warrant or not, the source information are the people who see and hear and make the observations that the court is being asked to rely on for purposes of probable cause,” McCarthy said. “It generally doesn’t matter if your case agent is credible, it’s whether your source information is.”
