Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham revealed that he will press former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on whether he’d still sign off on surveilling Trump campaign associate Carter Page knowing what is known now.
The South Carolina Republican gave the preview of next week’s hearing featuring testimony from Rosenstein, who approved the fourth and final Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Page and appointed special counsel Robert Mueller, during a Thursday interview with Hugh Hewitt. Graham also shed further light on which witnesses he planned to call and which other topics he planned to traverse in his investigation into the Trump-Russia investigators and their claims before the FISA court.
“The court relied upon warrant applications submitted by the highest levels of the FBI and Department of Justice. I’m starting with Rosenstein next Wednesday — he signed the last warrant application,” Graham said. “I want to ask him if he knew then what you know now, if you knew the Russian subsource that disavowed the dossier, which was the key document to get the warrant and against Carter Page, if he disavowed it in January 2017, would you have signed the application in June of 2017 knowing there was no there there? So, the goal here is to explore how the FISA court system failed. You can’t blame a judge when the cops lie and manipulate.”
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December report criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA warrants against Page in 2016 and 2017 and for the bureau’s reliance on British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s deeply flawed 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. Recently declassified footnotes show the FBI was aware that Steele’s subsources disputed the accuracy of his claims and knew that the dossier may have been compromised by Russian disinformation yet used it anyway.
Earlier this year, the Justice Department determined that the final two FISA warrants, including the one signed by Rosenstein, were “invalid.” The FBI told the FISA court it was working to “sequester” all the information obtained through the Page wiretaps, and FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress he was working to “claw back” information gleaned through the electronic surveillance of Page.
Graham said that the fact-checking process required for factual assertions in the FISA applications, known as the Woods Procedures, had “completely failed” as the DOJ and the FBI pursued surveillance of the Trump campaign member.
“We’re talking about investigating a sitting president’s campaign,” Graham said. “How is it possible that the leadership of the FBI and the Department of Justice doesn’t hear, ‘Oh, by the way, the case just collapsed?’ That’s what we’ll be looking at.”
Graham also confirmed to Hewitt that he’d also be calling fired FBI Director James Comey, fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to testify. The South Carolina Republican said he’d be calling FBI agent Joseph Pientka, who accompanied fired FBI agent Peter Strzok in the January 2017 interview of retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, and FBI agent Stephen Somma, the case agent deemed by Horowitz to be “primarily responsible” for big Page FISA failures, to testify too.
But he said he didn’t know if he’d be calling former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice and former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, noting that Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, is “going to look at all the things that happened from the election to transition” and “his committee is going to look at all that.” Johnson announced on Thursday his intention to have his committee vote on subpoenas related to Crossfire Hurricane, the FISA process, and the “unmasking” saga.
Graham also said he planned on calling former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, along with Clapper, to push them again on Flynn, unmaskings, and the Obama administration’s handling of the Trump-Russia investigation.
“I want to recall them both and ask them about the Horowitz report, ask them did you, if you knew then what you know now, would you have a different view of this whole investigation?” Graham said.
FBI records that released over the past few weeks have been touted by Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, as exculpatory evidence heretofore concealed from the defense team. They suggest that Strzok and the FBI’s “7th Floor” leadership stopped the bureau from closing its investigation into Flynn in early January 2017 after investigators had uncovered “no derogatory information” on him. Emails from later that month show Strzok, along with then-FBI lawyer Lisa Page and several others, sought out ways to continue investigating Flynn, including considering using the Logan Act.
The Justice Department has moved to dismiss the false statement charges against Flynn, but it is facing resistance from Flynn case Judge Emmet Sullivan.
