Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham released nearly a dozen transcripts of closed-door interviews conducted last year with key figures in the Trump-Russia inquiry, blasting FBI leadership under fired Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
The South Carolina Republican, who will be leaving the leadership post with Democrats taking control of the Senate, said the document dump on Friday was designed to get as much information from the 11 transcripts out to the public as possible, though some remains classified, hidden under redactions.
“I consider the Crossfire Hurricane investigation a massive system failure by senior leadership, but not representative of the dedicated, hardworking patriots who protect our nation every day at Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice,” Graham said in a lengthy statement, adding, “the leadership of the FBI under Comey and McCabe was either grossly incompetent or they knowingly allowed tremendous misdeeds. There was a blind eye turned toward any explanation other than the Trump campaign was colluding with foreign powers. At every turn the FBI and DOJ ran stop signs that were in abundance regarding exculpatory information.”
The transcripts included interviews with former top DOJ official Bruce Ohr, who had acted as a secret back channel for British ex-spy Christopher Steele and who resigned in September, and Dana Boente, the former FBI general counsel and briefly acting attorney general, who, along with Comey, signed off on the second renewal for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants targeting former Trump campaign associate Carter Page. Boente resigned in May.
An FBI agent known only as “Supervisory Special Agent 1” in DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s scathing report on the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, but believed to be Joseph Pientka, who accompanied fired FBI special agent Peter Strzok in interviewing retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in January 2017, was also interviewed, and that transcript, too, was released.
Horowitz’s report in December 2019 criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA warrants against Page for concealing potentially exculpatory information from the FISA Court related to denials by a number of Trump associates and for the bureau’s reliance on the Democratic-funded Steele dossier on President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. Declassified footnotes now show the FBI was aware that Steele’s dossier might have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
Other witness transcripts released Friday include Michael Steinbach, the former FBI executive assistant director who had concerns about Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page working together and Stuart Evans, the DOJ National Security Division’s former deputy assistant attorney general who Horowitz said rightly worried that Steele may have been hired by someone associated with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign or with the Democratic National Committee and didn’t think the FISA surveillance of Carter Page would be worth the risk.
Graham’s committee also released an interview with former FBI Deputy Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa, who was involved in the bureau’s unsuccessful efforts to verify Steele’s salacious and now-discredited dossier, interviews with Trump-Russia figures dubbed “Handling Agent 1, “Case Agent 1,” and “Supervisory Intelligence Analyst” in Horowitz’s report, as well as an interview with the deputy chief, of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence and export control section.
“There was no ‘there’ there. The investigation was pushed when it should have been stopped and the only logical explanation is that the investigators wanted an outcome because of their bias,” Graham contended on Friday. “Former FBI Director Comey and his deputy Mr. McCabe, through their incompetence and bias, have done a great disservice to the FBI and DOJ, and the senior DOJ leadership who signed off on the work product called the Crossfire Hurricane investigation have created a stain on the department’s reputation that can only be erased by true reform.”
Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation concluded that the Russian government interfered in a “sweeping and systematic fashion,” according to his April 2019 report, and his team also “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign.” But the special counsel “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
The special counsel also laid out 10 possible instances of Trump obstructing justice but did not reach a conclusion on that issue. Then-Attorney General William Barr and former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded Trump had not obstructed justice.
U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was elevated to special counsel in the fall, is investigating the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith admitted to Durham this summer that he falsified a document during the bureau’s efforts to renew its FISA authority to wiretap Carter Page, editing a CIA email in 2017 to state that Page was “not a source.”
