Two Senate Republicans asked the nation’s top spy chief on Thursday for assistance in declassifying four redacted footnotes in the Justice Department watchdog’s report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses.
The letter, sent by Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa on Thursday, comes after DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a memo showing FISA flaws were not just limited to the surveillance of Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
Johnson and Grassley reached out to Attorney General William Barr to aid them in their effort in late January, but the senators said they were now meeting resistance from the intelligence community, and therefore, they decided to reach out to acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, who oversees the coalition of 17 spy agencies.
“We very much appreciate Attorney General Barr’s focus on transparency and his understanding that this important information ought to be public. However, there are several sections of the footnotes that certain members of the Intelligence Community are concerned about declassifying,” the senators wrote. “We request that you ensure that all the footnotes are declassified to the fullest extent possible so that the American people have a full understanding of what transpired during the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
The findings of Horowitz’s audit released on Tuesday focused on the FBI’s requirement to maintain an accuracy subfile known as a “Woods file.” Investigators found serious problems in each of the 29 FISA applications they examined. “We believe that a deficiency in the FBI’s efforts to support the factual statements in FISA applications through its Woods Procedures undermines the FBI’s ability to achieve its ‘scrupulously accurate’ standard for FISA applications,” Horowitz concluded.
The memo was a follow-up to his larger report in December, in which Horowitz criticized the DOJ and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA warrants for Page and for the bureau’s reliance on British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s salacious and unverified dossier. Steele put his research together at the behest of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
“We have reviewed the findings of the Office of the Inspector General with regard to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and we are deeply concerned about certain information that remains classified,” Johnson and Grassley told Barr in their January letter accompanied by a still-classified addendum.
“Specifically, we are concerned that certain sections of the public version of the report are misleading because they are contradicted by relevant and probative classified information redacted in four footnotes,” the duo added. “This classified information is significant not only because it contradicts key statements in a section of the report but also because it provides insight essential for an accurate evaluation of the entire investigation. The American people have a right to know what is contained within these four footnotes and, without that knowledge, they will not have a full picture as to what happened during the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
Horowitz’s 478-page report on the Page warrants contains 535 footnotes, only a few dozen of which contain redacted information. Horowitz updated his report twice in December after its release, noting he “removed redactions of certain information related to Person 1” and updated what “Person 1” recalled in relation to WikiLeaks.
Horowitz described “Person 1” as a “key Steele sub-source” who was attributed with providing information in Steele’s dossier. The DOJ watchdog found the FBI “omitted information relevant to the reliability of Person 1” in its FISA applications, including that Steele told members of the Crossfire Hurricane team that “Person 1″ was a “boaster” and an “egoist” who “may engage in some embellishment.” The bureau also did not tell the FISA court that “the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation on Person 1 a few days before the FISA application was filed.”
Although the senators did not say which four footnotes they wanted declassified, there is a flurry of potentially important redacted footnotes related to “Person 1.”
“We learned that Person 1 was at the time a subject of an open FBI counterintelligence investigation,” Horowitz said while noting his team was concerned this was not relayed to the FISA court.
The footnote for that section says, “According to a document circulated among Crossfire Hurricane team members and supervisors in early October 2016, Person 1 had [redacted].” The footnote also says in December 2016 DOJ attorney Bruce Ohr told “SSA 1,” believed to be FBI agent Joseph Pientka, he met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, who “assessed that Person 1 was [redacted] who was central in connecting Trump to Russia.”
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham has been zeroing in on a January 2017 meeting the FBI had with another person described as Steele’s “Primary Sub-source,” who contradicted some of what “Person 1” allegedly claimed.
Horowitz’s report said, “The Primary Sub-source made statements during his/her January 2017 FBI interview that were inconsistent with multiple sections of the Steele reports” and, “regarding the allegations attributed to Person 1, the Primary Sub-source’s account of these communications … contradicted the allegations of a ‘well-developed conspiracy’ in” Steele’s dossier.
“The renewal applications omitted the fact that Steele’s Primary Sub-source, who the FBI found credible, had made statements in January 2017 raising significant questions about the reliability of allegations included in the FISA applications, including, for example, that he/she did not recall any discussion with Person 1 concerning Wikileaks and there was ‘nothing bad’ about the communications between the Kremlin and the Trump team, and that he/she did not report to Steele in July 2016 that Page had met with [Russian oligarch Igor] Sechin,” Horowitz wrote.
Trump gave Barr “full and complete authority to declassify information” last year to investigate the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation. Barr picked U.S. Attorney John Durham as his right-hand man, and the review upgraded into a criminal investigation in the fall.
Democrats have criticized the review as a politically motivated scheme to undermine the work of former special counsel Robert Mueller.
