Former MI6 spy Christopher Steele and former FBI Director James Comey could both be finding themselves in trouble thanks to Steele’s dossier, and the F.B.I. using the dossier to justify surveillance of Carter Page, an outsider who had a brief stint as a foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham both sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions last week, in which they outline how a second special counsel can investigate the FBI and Justice Department for their misconduct during the 2016 election.
What they want to know is whether or not Comey had misled Trump about the dossier. While Comey had met with Trump in January tell notify Trump of its existence, Comey referred to the dossier as “salacious and unverified” to Trump. While that’s what he told Trump, Comey’s FBI used the dossier to justify surveillance of Page. Not only that, Comey’s FBI used a Yahoo News article that relied on information Chris Steele had leaked to the author, Michael Isikoff, as proof of the dossier’s legitimacy.
In their application to the FISA court to spy on Page, the FBI asserted to the judge that Mr. Steele wasn’t the source for the Yahoo article, even though the Yahoo story continued with the exact same information.
But back to that January briefing. According to the Washington Times:
The briefing instantly leaked to CNN, rocking the transition team with a series of unverified dossier accusations. BuzzFeed then posted the 35-page dossier, which remains unconfirmed publicly.
“There is a question as to whether the FBI included the dossier in the briefing, and possibly leaked that it had done so, in order to provide the media a pretext to report on the dossier,” Mr. Grassley and Mr. Graham wrote.
Democrats, such as Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, seized on the dossier as authentic and used it to pummel the Trump White House for more than a year. “Did anyone express any concerns about the propriety of presenting unverified, uncorroborated claims from the Steele dossier as the basis for a FISA warrant on an American citizen?” the letter stated.
The letter also asked for an investigation into Mr. Steele’s ties to the Russian government and its intelligence services. The dossier’s claims, all of which have been denied by Trump people, were sourced by Mr. Steele to unknown Kremlin operatives.
Without the Nunes Memo released in February, Comey and Steele might have gotten away scot-free. No wonder Democrats were so afraid to see it released.
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