The Justice Department watchdog found omissions in renewal applications the FBI submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court seeking warrants to monitor onetime Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
A draft of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report, due out next week, shows the FBI failed to convey to the court that not all of the information it used from British ex-spy Christopher Steele was entirely reliable, according to the Washington Post.
Steele was an FBI informant enlisted to research then-presidential candidate Donald Trump by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm that had been hired by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Steele’s Democratic funding, his strong desire for Trump to lose, and the possible flaws with his dossier were not revealed to the court governed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
His dossier on alleged ties between Trump and Russia was used by the FBI to obtain the authority to wiretap Page, an American who had suspicious connections to the Russians. The first warrant application was submitted in October 2016, after which there were three renewals at three-month intervals, including ones in January, April, and June 2017. Page was never charged with wrongdoing, and special counsel Robert Mueller determined in his investigation there was insufficient evidence to establish criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
FBI agents interviewed one of Steele’s subsources and found that Steele’s raw intelligence, in need of further verification, was not completely reliable. Horowitz’s investigators found the FBI failed to convey this information in the later applications, but according to sources familiar with a draft of the report, the omissions were “apparently” not sufficient enough for the watchdog to conclude the applications should have been rejected.
Still, the Washington Post report states that it would be unusual for Horowitz to judge the FISA court’s rulings on warrant applications. It also notes that it has not viewed the draft report, which may differ from the final version, due to be released on Dec. 9.
The dossier, published in January 2017, included damaging and unsubstantiated claims about Trump that could be used as blackmail if true, including a so-called “pee tape.”
Attorney General William Barr told the Senate in May he was “concerned about” possible Russian disinformation in the dossier, and impeachment witness Fiona Hill, a Russia expert who was on Trump’s National Security Council, said the former MI6 officer “could have been played” by the Russians, though Steele told the co-founders of Fusion GPS there is no way he was duped by the Kremlin.
Horowitz began his investigation in March 2018 after a memo from the Republicans leading the House Intelligence Committee alleged the FBI misled the FISA court about the dossier’s Democratic benefactors and Steele’s anti-Trump bias. In a rebuttal to the GOP memo, Democrats argued the Justice Department and FBI “met the rigor, transparency, and evidentiary basis needed to meet FISA’s probable cause requirement.”
The warrant applications were approved by a number of high-ranking officials, including FBI Director James Comey, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, all of whom have since left the government.
Selective leaks last week about a draft report claim Horowitz found missteps and lapses in judgment by the FBI but no political bias by top officials tainting the Russia investigation, as Trump and his allies have claimed. Early reports have also asserted that investigators found no evidence of spying on the Trump campaign, although they acknowledge both informants and electronic surveillance methods were used by the FBI to collect information about members of the Trump team.
Barr said earlier this year he believed “spying did occur” on the Trump campaign and that the key question on his mind was whether it was justified. At least one FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, is now the subject of a criminal investigation for allegedly altering records related to the secret surveillance of Page. That case has been taken up by U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is conducting a criminal inquiry into the origins of the Russia investigation.
