‘Somebody Needs to Go to Jail for This’

New evidence the FBI misled the Senate Intelligence committee about the Steele dossier.

by James Freeman at WSJ Opinion

On Sunday Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) presented new evidence suggesting that in 2018 the FBI lied to the Senate Intelligence Committee about the bureau’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign. Specifically, the FBI appears to have made a series of claims directly contradicting information in its possession about the key source for the dossier of anti-Trump rumors compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele.

Appearing on Maria Bartiromo’s “Sunday Morning Futures” program on Fox News, Sen. Graham said that highly misleading information was given to senators after the FBI had misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court in obtaining a warrant to surveil a Trump campaign associate and long after the FBI had learned its alleged evidence of collusion with Russia was garbage.

“Somebody needs to go to jail for this. This is a second lie. This is a second crime. They lied to the FISA court,” said Graham, who adds that the FBI was then “lying to the Senate Intel Committee.”

Graham has released a copy of the FBI’s draft talking points for a Senate Intelligence Committee briefing. The document dated Feb. 14, 2018 includes the following claims about the Steele dossier’s key Russian source, known as the primary subsource: 

He did not cite any significant concerns with the way his reporting was characterized in the dossier to the extent he could identify it...

At minimum, our discussions with [the Primary Subsource] confirm that the dossier was not fabricated by Steele. Our discussions with [the Primary Subsource] confirmed that he operates within high level academic and government circles, maintains trusted relationships with individuals who are capable of reporting on the material he collected for Steele, and that Steele and [the Primary Subsource] utilized reasonably sound intelligence tradecraft. 

None of this was true, as the FBI had known for roughly a year before the date on the document. As the Obama-appointed Inspector General of the Justice Department Michael Horowitz reported last year, by January of 2017 the FBI was conducting the first of a series of interviews with the Steele dossier’s primary subsource. These interviews and other investigative activity “revealed potentially serious problems with Steele’s descriptions of information in his reports,” according to the IG. For example, “the Primary Sub-source made statements during [his] January 2017 FBI interview that were inconsistent with multiple sections of the Steele reports, including some that were relied upon in the FISA applications.” 

The IG added that the subsource “made statements indicating that Steele misstated or exaggerated the Primary Sub-source’s statements in multiple sections of the reporting.”
For example, a salacious story about Donald Trump which the dossier described as “confirmed” was actually just “rumor and speculation.” 

More holes in the dossier appeared the more the FBI talked to the subsource. The inspector general described a March 2017 FBI interview:

According to [Washington Field Office] Agent 1, the Primary Sub-source said [he] made it clear to Steele that [he] had no proof to support the statements from [his] sub-sources and that “it was just talk.” WFO Agent 1 said that the Primary Sub-source explained that [his] information came from “word of mouth and hearsay;” “conversation that [he] had with friends over beers;” and that some of the information, such as allegations about Trump’s sexual activities, were statements [he] heard made in “jest.” 

Believe it or not, the dossier’s credibility sank even lower in 2017. In April of this year Sens. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) releaseddeclassified footnotes from the inspector general’s report showing that in 2017 the FBI received reports that key dossier claims were not only false but may have been disinformation from Russian Intelligence Services. The senators noted:

For example, footnote 350 indicates that the FBI received a U.S. intelligence report on January 12, 2017, warning of an inaccuracy in the dossier related to Michael Cohen, and assessing that the material was “part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.”

... A similar U.S. intelligence report arrived on February 28, 2017, undercutting a key allegation against Trump, noting the claims “were false, and that they were the product of RIS “infiltrat[ing] a source into the network” of sources that contributed to the dossier.

For any FBI officials who fed senators the falsehoods contained in that document in 2018, justice must be done. Federal surveillance of political opponents--followed by an FBI coverup—cannot go unpunished if we want to preserve liberty and free elections. Sen. Marco Rubio (R.Fla.), who is now acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, tells this column via email that a new bipartisan committee report, “which is currently undergoing declassification, includes a thorough and critical review of FBI and DOJ activities. I believe Americans will find our analysis of Christopher Steele and the ‘Steele dossier,’ and the FBI’s handling of both, to be especially revealing.”

The surveillance abuses of 2016 and their impact on our politics are among the issues Ms. Bartiromo and your humble correspondent explore in a new book about the Trump presidency.