The FBI under Director Christopher Wray’s leadership deceived lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee during a 2018 briefing on the Russia investigation, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham told “Hannity” Monday, citing a document he obtained from the Department of Justice.
“This is really unbelievable … ” said Graham, R-S.C. “A year after they knew the Russian dossier was no longer reliable, they told the same lies to the Congress, not just the [FISA] court, as a completely new front of legal liability, and I’m going to find out what happened.”
DECLASSIFIED SENATE INTELLIGENCE REPORT SHOWS STRONG DOUBTS ABOUT STEELE DOSSIER IN DECEMBER 2016
According to Graham, the committee called the FBI to testify on the reliability of the notorious Steele Dossier. The dossier was pivotal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants the bureau obtained for former Trump aide Carter Page as part of its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Russian election interference.
The senator said that the FBI told the committee there was no reason to doubt the dossier and the primary sub-source that ex-British spy Christopher Steele used to put together the dossier, despite the fact the source had previously said that the dossier mischaracterizes the information he gave Steele.
GRAHAM SAYS FBI ‘MISLED THE HELL OUT OF’ SENATE INTEL COMMITTEE IN 2018 BRIEFING
In one line of the document released Sunday, the FBI said that “[a]t minimum, our discussions with [the primary subsource] confirm that the dossier was not fabricated by Steele.”
Graham argued, however, that the unnamed sub-source “told the FBI that the dossier is a bunch of bar talk, hearsay, never corroborated,” and that it should be taken “with a grain of salt,” but “they continued to use it against Carter Page to get a warrant in April and June [2017],” he explained.
Documents recently released by the Senate Intelligence Committee indicate that there were strong doubts about the reliability of the Steele Dossier as early as December 2016. As the FBI and CIA worked together to create an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) to present to President Barack Obama, those in the CIA camp, according to the now-declassified interviews conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee, worried that the FBI was playing up the Steele Dossier too much.
Graham called on FBI Director Christopher Wray to address why “the Senate Intel Committee was briefed about the dossier and the Russian subsource in the same fashion that the FISA court was briefed,” which Graham called “very misleading.”
“This happened on Wray’s watch,” he emphasized.
“Apparently, somebody on the Intel committee and the Senate wanted to be briefed about the reliability of the sub-source,” Graham said. ” We found that briefing paper and they told the Senate Intel committee the same story they told the FISA court. They did not tell the truth about the Russian sub-source, just about the dossier and I want Christopher Wray to account for how that happened.”
