Sen. Lindsey Graham said there are up to six instances in which “the system” was warned that British ex-spy Christopher Steele was unreliable when it came to his research about President Trump.
So far, there are at least two known instances in which the FBI was alerted about Steele, who authored an anti-Trump dossier used by the Justice Department and the FBI to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to wiretap onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in 2016 and 2017.
During a radio interview with Sean Hannity on Friday, Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said there are other examples he can’t talk about yet.
“There’s four events that I’m aware of — five actually — where the system was informed that Christopher Steele was an unreliable informant when it came to Trump. That he had a political bias and agenda. That on five different occasions, the system, for lack of a better word, was told, ‘Be wary of this guy,'” the South Carolina Republican said.
“Some of them I can’t tell you yet until we get this stuff declassified. But I think it’s going to be five; it may be six,” Graham said, adding that he wants to put together a chart showing the timeline of when “the system” received warnings and any efforts by the DOJ and the FBI to verify the dossier. Graham said this could help clear up whether there was any malicious intent to try and take down Trump should there be any prosecutions in the future.
The Republican leader’s interview took place hours after the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz notified Attorney General William Barr that he has completed his investigation into alleged Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses by the Justice Department and the FBI, which examined the Page warrants.
Horowitz’s team reportedly interviewed Steele in June.
When Horowitz’s report comes out, following a classification review, Graham has said his committee will conduct its own “deep dive” into the early stages of the Trump-Russia investigation. Graham has also asked Attorney General William Barr to declassify nine sets of documents from Horowitz’s report.
These documents include “Gang of Eight” material, including transcripts of conversations between Trump campaign associate George Papadopoulos and confidential informants such as to Stefan Halper. Graham also seeks FISA filings related to Page and any other Trump associates, FBI or DOJ documents related to Steele and opposition research firm Fusion GPS, and records related to defensive briefings given to the Clinton and Trump campaigns by intelligence officials in 2016.
The dossier contained salacious and unverified claims about President Trump’s ties to Russia. It 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 in January, April, and June 2017.
The warrant applications were approved by a number of high-ranking officials, including former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.
Comey, who described the dossier as “salacious and unverified” during congressional testimony in June 2017, the month after he was fired by Trump, told Fox News last year that it was his recollection that “there was a significant amount of additional material about Page and why there was probable cause to believe he was an agent of a foreign power. And the dossier was part of that but was not all of it or a critical part of it.”
Still, Republicans allege the FBI knew very well it was unverified and should not have used it before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, claims that were bolstered by recent disclosures.
Memos obtained by Citizens United and shared with the Washington Examiner show Steele met with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec 10 days before the first FISA application was submitted, and he admitted to her that he was encouraged by his client to get his research out before the 2016 election. Kavalec notated the conversation, also finding glaring flaws with some of Steele’s claims, and passed her findings along to the FBI. It is not yet known if the FBI took her skepticism into consideration.
Another document disclosure related to Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, who acted as a backchannel between Steele and the FBI after the bureau cut Steele off as a confidential human source following the discovery that he had been improperly providing information to journalists while working with them.
Following a November 2016 meeting with Ohr, the interviewing FBI agents wrote that Ohr told them Steele “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. President.” Ohr said he believed Steele “wanted to blunt or foil the Kremlin’s plans.” Steele’s explicit motivations were also not made clear to the FISA Court. Ohr stressed he “never believed” Steele was “making up information or shading it” and that he believed Steele was just passing along what his sources in Russia were telling him, but added “that doesn’t make that story true.” Ohr raised the specter of possible Russian disinformation, noting “there are always Russian conspiracy theories that come from the Kremlin” and providing a redacted example.
Republicans are also trying to track down a letter from the British Embassy to the incoming national security team after Trump was elected to the White House, which is mentioned in a filing unsealed this week in federal court by former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s lawyers. The filing claims this letter was also sent to outgoing national security adviser Susan Rice and “apparently disavows former British Secret Service Agent Christopher Steele, calls his credibility into question and declares him untrustworthy.”
Rep. Devin Nunes, in an interview Wednesday with Hannity on Fox News, claimed the elusive memo from the British government disavowing Steele’s credibility is real and his team of investigators have been looking for it.
