Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe has agreed to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, according to Chairman Lindsey Graham.
The South Carolina Republican said on Sunday the former No. 2 at the bureau is set to appear on Oct. 6, about a week after former FBI Director James Comey is scheduled to testify.
“I’m very glad he is,” Graham said on Fox News.
McCabe, who rose up the FBI ranks after joining the bureau in the mid 1990s, was a key member of the Trump-Russia investigation. DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a report in 2018 detailing multiple instances in which McCabe “lacked candor” with Comey, FBI investigators, and inspector general investigators about his authorization to leak sensitive information to the Wall Street Journal that revealed the existence of an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Horowitz’s report concluded that “the evidence is substantial” that McCabe misled investigators “knowingly and intentionally.” Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe in March 2018, just before he was set to retire.
The Justice Department declined to press charges against McCabe in February, and a federal judge ruled last week that McCabe’s wrongful termination lawsuit could move toward discovery.
Graham also said he is negotiating with fired FBI agent Peter Strzok to bring him in for a hearing and that he wants to hear from William Barnett, one of the FBI agents involved with the inquiry into retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn who has cast doubt on the Trump-Russia collusion theory and criticized members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team for how they handed the investigation.
Comey is scheduled to testify on Wednesday, and Graham gave a preview of what he would be asking the fired FBI director.
“Did you know that the man who put the dossier together for Christopher Steele was a suspected Russian spy on the payroll of the Democratic Party? If you knew that, why didn’t you tell the court?” Graham said he would ask. “Did you know that the Russian sub-source was interviewed by your own agents in January and March of 2017 and he disavowed the dossier as being unreliable bar talk and hearsay, and if you knew that why didn’t you tell the court because in April of 2017 you signed a warrant for none of this was in there. I’m going to ask him that and there’s nothing classified about that.”
Comey told CNN on Friday that he will need to prepare for the hearing by reading up on the newly released records showing British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s main source for his anti-Trump dossier was the subject of an earlier counterintelligence investigation by the bureau. Comey also said he will “remind” the committee and “everybody who still cares about this that the investigation was begun based on information having nothing to do with the Steele dossier, setting aside the merits of the Steele dossier, which are important to debate, this was begun based on credible information unconnected to that material, and we should’ve been fired if we didn’t investigate.”
Graham’s committee has already received testimony from former Deputy Attorneys General Rod Rosenstein and Sally Yates this year, both of whom said they would not have signed off on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page if they knew then what they know now. Graham said earlier this month that former special counsel Robert Mueller declined an investigation to testify.
Mueller’s team concluded in early 2019 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
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, who denied any wrongdoing and was never charged with a crime, and for the bureau’s reliance on Steele’s discredited Democratic-funded dossier. Declassified footnotes from Horowitz’s report indicated that the bureau became aware that Steele’s dossier might have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
