The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General interviewed the British ex-spy who authored the unsubstantiated and salacious dossier attacking President Trump and extended its investigation afterward, according to a new report.
Michael Horowitz, the DOJ inspector general, launched an investigation in March 2018 into whether the FBI and DOJ filing of four FISA applications and renewals beginning in October 2016 to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was an abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process. The applications relied heavily upon the unverified dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who was hired by Fusion GPS. The opposition research firm was hired by Marc Elias of the Perkins Coie law firm at the behest of the Clinton presidential campaign.
Reuters reported that three attorneys from the DOJ inspector general’s team met with Steele in person in London in early June, during Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom. The investigators found Steele’s information credible enough to warrant extending their investigation indefinitely.
Attorney General William Barr had predicted earlier this year that Horowitz’s investigation would wrap up in May or June.
Steele’s two-day interview, which lasted 16 hours, was attended by Steele’s American attorney and started out contentious, Politico reported. Investigators spoke with Steele about his “extensive work on Russian interference efforts globally, his intelligence-collection methods and his findings about Trump campaign adviser Carter Page,” and felt that he “offered new and important information.”
This seems to contradict recent comments made by House Judiciary Committee member John Ratcliffe of Texas, who said earlier in July that he’d met with Horowitz in late June and Horowitz had said his investigation had concluded.
Horowitz had reportedly been homing in on Steele for months, and sources close to Steele expressed his willingness to meet with Horowitz in June.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team reportedly met with Steele twice in September 2017, and Steele also provided a written statement to the Senate’s Intelligence Committee in August 2018.
Republicans in Congress have long cast doubt on the credibility of Steele’s dossier, but they’re not the only ones. Watergate journalist Bob Woodward has been calling it “garbage” for more than two years, and former CIA Moscow station chief Daniel Hoffman told the Washington Examiner that “I called what bullshit the dossier was a year and a half ago … It’s likely FSB [the successor agency to the KGB] disinformation.”
A number of Steele’s biggest claims — including the allegation stemming from “Kremlin insiders” that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had met in Prague with Putin associates and foreign hackers — were knocked down in Mueller’s report.
Other possible targets of the DOJ inspector general’s inquiry likely included the approvers and signers of the four FISA warrant applications and renewals from October 2016 through June 2017, including former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and the former Acting Attorney General and now current FBI General Counsel Dana Boente, the only signer of a Page FISA application who is still in office.
Horowitz’s last high-profile investigation, which looked into the handling of the Clinton email investigation by the DOJ and FBI, resulted in a 568-page report released in June 2018.
