When officials briefed then-candidate Donald Trump in August 2016 about threats Russia posed to his campaign, they did not inform him about a counterintelligence investigation into members of his team.
During an interview on Thursday, Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, highlighted how he thought it was ridiculous that FBI agent Peter Strzok coordinated the intelligence briefing for Trump’s campaign when he was the one who opened the counterintelligence investigation less than three weeks prior.
“There was a defensive briefing of candidate Trump on Aug. 17 of 2016,” Ratcliffe, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said on Fox News. “And I can tell you what he wasn’t told: He wasn’t warned about a Russia investigation that Peter Strzok had opened 18 days earlier.”
Ratcliffe declined to discuss classified information, but he had been asked to comment on reporting that found the FBI did not warn Trump campaign officials about Russian efforts to reach out to Trump’s team specifically and that two of his aides, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, were under FBI scrutiny.
Strzok was the lead investigator of the Hillary Clinton emails inquiry and opened the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the summer of 2016.
Text messages between Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, in which they displayed a negative opinion of Trump, were uncovered over the course of the Justice Department’s inspector general investigation into the DOJ and FBI’s conduct during the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized private email server. Upon the discovery of these texts, Strzok was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and was later fired from the bureau.
“Why would Peter Strzok, who would participate at [former FBI Director] Jim Comey’s direction in a defensive briefing designed to protect and warn a candidate, be the same person who is in fact at that time already investigating the candidate’s campaign? That shouldn’t happen. There should be answers to those questions,” Ratcliffe said.
Gregory Brower, assistant director of the FBI’s Office of Congressional Affairs, wrote Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in October 2017 to confirm “an experienced FBI counterintelligence agent” advised both the Trump campaign and that of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in August 2016 about Russia.
But Trump complained that the FBI did not adequately inform him of the Russian threat to his campaign last year. “With Spies, or ‘Informants’ as the Democrats like to call them because it sounds less sinister (but it’s not), all over my campaign, even from a very early date, why didn’t the crooked highest levels of the FBI or ‘Justice’ contact me to tell me of the phony Russia problem?” he tweeted.
CNN law enforcement analyst Josh Campbell said at the time that it would make sense if the FBI did not share specific details with Trump’s team.
“They likely would not be so specific as to outline the things they are seeing, because they don’t want to blow their investigation,” Campbell said. “But it is incumbent upon the intelligence community to provide both candidates with a baseline level of what the threat is and how to protect against those threats.”
Mueller concluded his 22-month investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election in March, and a redacted report released in April showed he was unable to find sufficient evidence of criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
