Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham unveiled a letter from the Justice Department lawyer who signed off on all the surveillance warrant applications seeking court authority to wiretap former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
In the letter, which the South Carolina Republican read aloud and entered into the record at a hearing Wednesday with former FBI Director James Comey, the Office of Intelligence attorney said he or she would not have signed off on the applications had he or she known about the issues that have since been uncovered by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
“The OI attorney advises that had he/she been aware of the significant errors and omissions identified by the OIG and the errors in the Woods process, he/she would not have signed the filed Page FISA applications,” the letter from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd to Graham obtained by the Washington Examiner states. “The OI attorney further advises that he/she is not aware of any additional errors or omissions in the Page FISA applications or in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation more generally that were not identified in the OIG Report.”
Graham then noted that two ex-DOJ officials who had also signed off on the Page surveillance, former Deputy Attorneys General Rod Rosenstein and Sally Yates, both testified to the panel that they would not have signed off on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants if they knew then what they know now. Four FISA applications and renewals against Page were approved by FBI and DOJ leadership and by the FISA court, including three approvals by Comey. Page has denied any wrongdoing and was never charged with a crime.
The hearing Wednesday is the latest in the judiciary panel’s inquiry into Crossfire Hurricane, the code name for the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, which was later wrapped into former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Comey later told Graham that he would not have signed off on the Page FISA applications without a “much fuller” discussion about what was being presented to the FISA court.
Horowitz released a report on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation in December that said his team “identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed. We found that the problems we identified were primarily caused by the Crossfire Hurricane team failing to share all relevant information with OI and, consequently, the information was not considered by the Department decision makers who ultimately decided to support the applications.” The watchdog report further found that “none of the inaccuracies and omissions that we identified in the renewal applications were brought to the attention of OI before the applications were filed.”
The watchdog report stated, “We identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications, and many additional errors in the Woods Procedures.” It added that “these errors and omissions resulted from case agents providing wrong or incomplete information to OI and failing to flag important issues for discussion.”
Horowitz’s report also criticized the FBI’s reliance on British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who put his research together at the behest of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was funded by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm.
Graham recently made public declassified documents showing that the FBI previously investigated Steele’s main source, revealed to be United States-based and Russian-trained lawyer Igor Danchenko, as a possible “threat to national security” due to his connections with Russian intelligence. Recent revelations include that Steele’s dossier relied on Danchenko, who employed shady Russian subsources and contradicted allegations within and undermined the credibility of Steele’s research. Declassified footnotes from Horowitz’s report indicate the bureau became aware that Steele’s dossier may have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
In January, the DOJ determined that the final two of four Page FISA warrants “were not valid.”
