Former FBI Director James Comey claimed to have no knowledge of and declined to talk about Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe’s letter revealing an unverified Russian intelligence analysis that alleged Hillary Clinton approved a campaign plan to create a scandal during the 2016 election to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee.
Under questioning by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham during a hearing on Wednesday, Comey, who was sworn in and testified via video conference, said he read the letter but that he didn’t remember being briefed on the claims and could not answer the question posed to him because he had “trouble understanding” the letter.
Graham asked if Comey recalled “getting an inquiry from the intelligence community in September 2016 about a concern that the Clinton campaign was going to create a scandal regarding Trump and Russia.” The fired FBI director replied, “I do not.”
Ratcliffe’s Tuesday letter stated in part: “U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
“You don’t remember getting an investigatory lead from the intelligence community?” Graham asked again. “You don’t remember getting that?” Comey told him that “that doesn’t ring any bells with me.”
Ratcliffe’s letter said that handwritten notes by former CIA Director John Brennan show he briefed former President Barack Obama and other top national security officials on the Russian intelligence, including the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” Nick Shapiro, the former deputy chief of staff to Brennan, told the Washington Examiner that “DNI Ratcliffe should be ashamed of his blatant politicization of his position.”
“Well, that’s a pretty stunning thing that it didn’t ring a bell, but it did come to you. Let’s just end with this: you get this inquiry from the intelligence community to look at the Clinton campaign, basically trying to create a distraction accusing Trump of being a Russian agent or a Russian stooge or whatever to distract from her email server problems, and how far-fetched is that, Mr. Comey, when we now know that the Democratic Party through Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, a foreign agent who had a very strong bias against Trump, who hired Russian sub-source who the FBI believed to be a Russian spy, to compile a dossier that was a bunch of crap to be used an American citizen working for the Trump campaign,” Graham said on Wednesday, asking again, “You already knew that — seems to me you’d want to investigate other allegations. … You don’t recall this inquiry?”
Comey replied again that “it doesn’t sound familiar.”
Graham recently made public declassified documents showing the FBI had previously investigated the main source used by British ex-spy Christopher Steele in his anti-Trump dossier, revealed to be U.S.-based and Russian-trained lawyer Igor Danchenko, as a possible “threat to national security.” Earlier this year, it was revealed that Danchenko had cast doubt on the reliability and credibility of the former MI6 agent’s Trump-Russia reporting in January 2017, which the bureau concealed from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Graham claims the bureau misled the Senate Intelligence Committee about the reliability of Steele’s dossier in 2018. Records also show the FBI even considered pursuing FISA surveillance against Steele’s source years prior.
Graham again pressed the former FBI director for an answer: “You said you had a duty to look at allegations about the Trump campaign being involved with the Russians. You’ve got a letter now from Ratcliffe saying that they intercepted information about an effort in July where Hillary Clinton approved an effort to link Trump to Russia. … Did you have an investigation to look and see if that was true?”
Comey replied, “I can’t answer that. I’ve read Mr. Ratcliffe’s letter, which frankly I have trouble understanding.”
After a two-year investigation, former special counsel Robert Mueller released a report in April 2019, concluding that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.”
