The intelligence briefing the FBI gave to Donald Trump’s team during the 2016 campaign was a “pretext” to gather evidence on the candidate and his foreign policy adviser to help in their counterintelligence investigation, according to the Justice Department watchdog.
The FBI never briefed Trump’s campaign about its fear that Russians might be attempting to infiltrate his campaign, but Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who testified Wednesday about his report on the Russia investigation, said the bureau used an intelligence briefing ostensibly about guarding against foreign interference to gather evidence against Trump and retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign got an identical briefing, Horowitz said, but hers was not used by the FBI to collect information on the candidate or her team. Clinton’s campaign was not the subject of a counterintelligence investigation.
“It was a strategic counterintelligence briefing. I mention that because it precisely wasn’t a defensive briefing. It was an intelligence briefing,” Horowitz told lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “They were treated differently in that the agent wrote it up to the file and put the information in the file. The briefings were identical, but one was for investigative purposes, and one was purely for the intelligence briefing.”
Horowitz said the goal of a counterintelligence investigation “is to identify potential threats to the nation” and criticized the FBI’s decision to use a defensive briefing in this way.
“They sent a supervisory agent to the briefing from the Crossfire Hurricane team, and that agent prepared a report to the file of the briefing. About what Mr. Trump and Mr. Flynn said,” Horowitz testified, referring to the code name for the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation. “The incident, the event, the meeting was a briefing, and the FBI considered and decided to send that agent there to do the briefing. So the agent was actually doing the briefing but also using it for the purpose of investigation.”
Horowitz testified two days after the release of his 467-page report detailing 17 significant errors and omissions in the DOJ and FBI’s use of British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s salacious and unverified dossier when pursuing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page after the counterintelligence investigation began in late July 2016. The FBI says four members of Trump’s campaign, all Americans, were initially being scrutinized as part of that inquiry. Flynn was one of them, but Trump was not a subject of the investigation at the time. At the conclusion of his Russia investigation, which enveloped Crossfire Hurricane, special counsel Robert Mueller could not establish any criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
The FBI’s stated purpose for the intelligence briefing was to provide the Trump campaign, “a baseline on the presence and threat posed by foreign intelligence services to the national security of the U.S.” But Horowitz’s report also found a “supervisory special agent was selected to provide the FBI briefings, in part, because Flynn, who was a subject in the ongoing Crossfire Hurricane investigation, would be attending the Trump campaign briefing.”
The FBI viewed the briefing of Trump and his advisers “as a possible opportunity to collect information potentially relevant to the Crossfire Hurricane and Flynn investigations.” The FBI agent in attendance documented his interactions at the briefing and “added the electronic communication to the Crossfire Hurricane investigative file.”
Horowitz said the decision to take this action was made by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and FBI top lawyer Jim Baker, who have both since left the bureau. The bureau did not tell the Justice Department or the other Intelligence Community participants that they were using the briefing for investigative purposes,” the inspector general noted.
“We concluded that the FBI’s use of this briefing for investigative reasons could potentially interfere with the expectation of trust and good faith among participants in strategic intelligence briefings, thereby frustrating their purpose,” said Horowitz’s report, which included addressing this matter as one of nine main recommendations for the bureau.
This was not the last time the FBI collected information about the Trump team while briefing him.
In a separate report in September, which focused on FBI Director James Comey’s mishandling of his memo, Horowitz refers to a January 2017 Trump Tower briefing by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, and Comey on their assessment on Russian interference. The inspector general found Comey’s one-on-one meeting with Trump after everyone else left was not just about informing Trump of allegations from British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s Fusion GPS-funded dossier, but was treated by Comey and the FBI as a chance to gather information in their Trump-Russia investigation.
FBI Counterintelligence Division assistant director Bill Priestap told Horowitz for his FISA investigation that he had considered whether the FBI should conduct defensive briefings for Trump’s campaign, but ultimately decided not to because “if someone on the campaign was engaged with the Russians, he/she would very likely change his/her tactics and/or otherwise seek to cover-up his/her activities, thereby preventing us from finding the truth.”
Horowitz concluded this was a “judgment call that DOJ and FBI policy leaves to the discretion of FBI officials.”
Attorney General William Barr, who is overseeing U.S. Attorney John Durham’s criminal inquiry into the Russia investigation, said officials did not follow normal procedures in conducting a full investigation, which he noted would include informing the campaign.
“The — and there certainly were people in the campaign that could be trusted,” Barr told NBC News on Tuesday, pointing to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Jeff Sessions, a senator who would later become Trump’s attorney general.
While condemning the actions of the bureau in Wednesday’s hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham referenced a defensive briefing the Senate would be getting from the FBI on Thursday about foreign influence threats in the 2020 election.
“I hope that doesn’t happen to us tomorrow — I’ll be really pissed if it does,” Graham said, then asking, “When we get defensively briefed tomorrow, would it be okay for FBI agents to open up 302s [FBI interview notes] on what we said?”
“We have very significant concerns about that, and I would note that in FBI Director Christopher Wray’s response, he underlined that would not occur going forward,” Horowitz replied.
“To those who can put aside how you feel about Trump for a minute — under the guise of protecting the campaign from Russian influence, they never lift a finger to protect the campaign,” Graham said. “Every time they had information that the people they suspected were working for the Russians, it went the other way, and they kept going.”
During his opening statement, Graham said he wanted to make it clear that “a counterintelligence investigation is not a criminal investigation — they are not trying to solve a crime, they are trying to stop foreign powers from interfering in America” and that “a counterintelligence investigation is designed to protect Americans from foreign influence.”
When it became clear the Russians were attempting to harm Clinton’s campaign, Graham said, “The FBI picked up that effort, they briefed her about it, and they were able to stop it.” But, he added, “From the time they opened up Crossfire Hurricane until this debacle was over, they never made any effort to brief Donald Trump about suspected problems within his campaign.”
“We will be receiving a defensive briefing tomorrow as a committee from the FBI to tell us all about what we should be watching for, and they may be some specific threats against us, I don’t know,” Graham said. “But I know they are going to brief us to protect us, not to surveil us.”
