A top Senate Republican said he plans to subpoena Bill Priestap, a key leader in the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, after pushback from the former bureau official’s lawyer.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures that he is escalating his effort to interview the FBI’s former head of counterintelligence. The senator said he believes Priestap gave misleading information to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018 about the reliability of British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier.
Graham said he expected to interview Priestap last week, but “his lawyer contacted us and put conditions on the interview that are unacceptable.” So, the senator said, “I’m going to subpoena him,” in part, because it was Priestap “who gave the Senate Intel a briefing about the reliability of the subsource in 2018 that basically whitewashed the actual evidence.”
“I don’t know what Mr. Priestap did or didn’t do, but I know the briefing given to the Intel Committee was an absolute lie about the reliability of the subsource,” the senator said.
“It does sound to me like there was an effort to mislead the Senate Intel Committee,” Graham said, adding, “if they had told the Senate Intel Committee the truth about the reliability of the subsource, it would expose their lie to the FISA court.”
The senator contends the FBI misled the Senate Intelligence Committee in early 2018 about Steele’s primary subsource, recently revealed to be Russian-trained, Washington, D.C.-based lawyer Igor Danchenko, who the FBI knew by then had undermined the credibility of many of Steele’s Trump-Russia allegations following multiple interviews with him in early 2017.
Graham said U.S. Attorney John Durham is a “good guy” and pledged to “turn over” any evidence he unearths about the FBI’s 2018 Senate briefing to the prosecutor who is conducting a Justice Department inquiry into the Russia investigation. Graham said that FBI Director Christopher Wray has been helpful but still “needs to clean house over there.” The senator said he would get documents Monday “to find out how that briefing was put together.”
Graham also has said a newly declassified FBI document appears to make a host of misleading claims about Danchenko. In a letter sent on Monday, the senator told Wray that “each of these statements is clearly inaccurate” based on information uncovered through the senator’s inquiry and by DOJ Inspector General Horowitz’s investigation into the FBI’s Russia inquiry, which ended late last year.
Horowitz, who released his report in December, said FBI interviews with Steele’s primary subsource “raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting” and cast doubt on some of its biggest claims. The DOJ watchdog noted the primary subsource “made statements during his/her January 2017 FBI interview that were inconsistent with multiple sections of the Steele reports, including some that were relied upon in the FISA applications” and that Danchenko’s account “was not consistent with and, in fact, contradicted the allegations of a ‘well-developed conspiracy’” in Steele’s dossier.
Priestap, who had been the assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division from December 2015 to December 2018, was the leader of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Russian interference and allegations of Trump-Russia collusion. Former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, released in April 2019, said Russians interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion,” but it “did not establish” any criminal collusion between any Russians and anyone in President Trump’s orbit.
One revelation in Horowitz’s report was that now-fired FBI special agent Peter Strzok was involved in the decision to initiate the counterintelligence investigation into Trump and Russia, but it was his superior, Priestap, who made the actual authorization in late July 2016.
A page of handwritten notes from Priestap, dated the day of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s FBI interview in January 2017, were made public this spring. They show that he asked, “What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”
Flynn, also a target of the Russia investigation, pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators about his conversations with a Russian envoy, but this year, he began to argue that he is innocent and was set up by the FBI. The Justice Department then moved to drop the prosecution, but the judge overseeing the case has resisted immediately doing so.
Recently declassified FBI records show the FBI used a counterintelligence briefing given to then-candidate Trump and Flynn as a pretext to aid its investigation. Priestap told Horowitz 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.”
During the compilation of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment after Trump’s victory, Priestap and the FBI’s intelligence section chief both wrote to the CIA to describe Steele as “reliable.”
Horowitz’s lengthy December report criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page and for the bureau’s reliance on Steele’s Democratic-funded and unverified dossier. Declassified footnotes now show the FBI was aware that Steele’s dossier might have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
