Fox News host Sean Hannity said British ex-spy Christopher Steele should be extradited to the United States.
Steele, the author of a dossier that contained unverified allegations about President Trump’s ties to Russia that was used by the FBI, reportedly refused to cooperate with U.S. Attorney John Durham’s inquiry into the origins of the Russia investigation.
Hannity evoked the Trump administration’s effort to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been charged with violating the Espionage Act after publishing classified documents containing the names of confidential military and foreign sources, saying on Monday’s show: “Christopher Steele refuses to cooperate with the Durham probe. I say extradite him. You can leave Assange. I will take Steele.”
Hannity later told California Rep. Devin Nunes and other guests that Assange is “part of a media group” and opined the U.S. would not win its case to extradite him from the United Kingdom.
“The guy I want extradited is Christopher Steele. Why aren’t we going after him?” he said.
Nunes, the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, appeared to agree that Steele should be extradited if he does not cooperate with Durham but also cautioned that Steele’s public remarks could not be trusted.
Representatives for Steele, whose unverified dossier was used by the FBI to obtain warrants to wiretap a member of Trump’s 2016 campaign, were recently approached by members of the federal prosecutor’s team, and they said the former MI6 agent would not cooperate with the inquiry, according to Reuters. Sources for the report said Steele was concerned about politicization and not being treated fairly.
In an address to students at Oxford University in England on Friday, Steele said he and his private investigative firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, had already “done our duty” by cooperating with the Justice Department watchdog, according to the Daily Beast. “I stand by the integrity of our work, our sources, and what we did,” Steele told the students, adding, “Trump himself doesn’t like intelligence because its ground truth is inconvenient for him.”
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz investigated allegations of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses and interviewed Steele. His report, released in December, identified at least 17 “significant errors or omissions” in the Justice Department’s and the FBI’s use of Steele’s dossier when pursuing FISA warrants to wiretap onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who was suspected of being an agent of Russia but was never charged with wrongdoing, in 2016 and 2017.
