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Russia case footnotes to be declassified, exposing FBI
concerns about Steele disinformation
Previously redacted footnotes from Inspector General
Michael Horowitz's report expected to raise questions about prior FBI
assessment of key informant.
FBI to face new scrutiny
with declassified Russia case notes.
By John Solomon
Last Updated: April 9, 2020 - 6:33pm
U.S.
intelligence has decided to declassify several redacted footnotes from a recent
Justice Department report that will expose more problems with the FBI’s
investigation into President Trump’s campaign, including that agents possessed
evidence their main informant may have been the victim of Russian
disinformation, Just the News has learned.
The previously redacted footnotes are likely to
raise new concerns that the FBI ignored flashing red warning signals about
the informant Christopher Steele and gave a false picture in briefing materials
supplied to Congress.
The declassified sections from Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December review of
FBI FISA abuse could be made available to key Senate and House committees as
early as the end of this week, according to people familiar with the effort.
The unredacted footnotes are expected to provide new data
points in the timeline showing when the FBI learned, or should have suspected,
that its key evidence suggesting Trump was colluding with Russia was erroneous
and how high up those concerns were known, the sources said.
The new information “will make clear the FBI possessed
information at multiple levels that undercut the evidence it was using to
sustain a collusion investigation” and will be specific enough to renew a
debate in Washington over “whether the FBI intentionally ignored red flags or
simply was blinded by ambition from seeing them clearly,” one source with direct
knowledge said.
The evidence could also raise new questions about whether
statements made to Congress during the Russia probe were false or misleading,
and whether the intelligence community’s official assessment that Vladimir
Putin was solely trying to help elect Trump was contradicted by some evidence
in FBI files, the sources said.
The declassification was prompted in part by a letter sent in January by Senate Finance Committee Chairman
Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., that
requested four footnotes from the Horowitz report be declassified.
Grassley and Johnson are two strong allies of Trump who
played a key role in debunking the false collusion allegations the FBI
investigated. Johnson's investigators flagged the redacted passages during a
review of the Horowitz report and worked with Grassley's team to escalate to
Attorney General William Barr.
“We are concerned that certain sections of the public
version of the report are misleading because they are contradicted by relevant
and probative classified information redacted in four footnotes,” Grassley and
Johnson wrote Barr. “This classified information is significant not only
because it contradicts key statements in a section of the report, but also
because it provides insight essential for an accurate evaluation of the entire
investigation.”
The two followed up with a letter earlier this month to the Acting Director of National
Intelligence (DNI) Ric Grenell saying the release of
the classified information would provide "insight essential for an
accurate evaluation of the entire investigation."
Sources said DNI and Justice Department are planning to
declassify those four footnotes as well as others in the report that will
provide new understanding about failures in the FBI’s now-debunked Russia
collusion probe.
One of the key revelations will be the unmasking of
footnotes that show specific red flags raised inside the bureau’s intelligence
files that Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent whose anti-Trump dossier
played a key role in the collusion probe, could have been the victim of Russian
disinformation through his contacts with Russian oligarchs, the sources said.
Horowitz's report in December concluded that most of the
allegations Steele included in the dossier he gave the FBI were inaccurate,
uncorroborated, or internet rumor and that the FBI falsely represented to the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that Steele's intelligence had been
verified in securing a FISA warrant to target the Trump campaign and former
adviser Carter Page in fall 2016 in an investigation code-named Crossfire
Hurricane.
Horowitz’s report also raised concerns the FBI failed
to fully evaluate evidence in its intelligence files that suggested Russian
disinformation was flowing to Steele, who was working during the 2016 campaign
for the opposition research firm trying to help Hillary Clinton and the
Democratic Party defeat Trump.
Those concerns were echoed in the report by former FBI
counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap and former Justice Department lawyer
Stuart Evans.
“In view of information we found in FBI files we reviewed,
and that was available to the Crossfire Hurricane team during the relevant time
period, we believe that more should have been done to examine Steele's contacts
with intermediaries of Russian oligarchs in order to assess those contacts as
potential sources of disinformation that could have influenced Steele's reporting
or, at a minimum, influenced Steele's understanding of events in Russia that
furnished context for the analytical judgments he used to evaluate the
reporting,” Horowitz wrote at the time. “We agree with the assessment of
Priestap and Evans that this issue warranted more scrutiny than it was
afforded.”
While Horowitz raised the issue broadly, a detailed set of
footnotes laying out what actually was in the FBI files was completely
redacted. That footnote is expected, along with other information, to be
declassified.
Persons familiar with the effort said the new
declassifications also may raise questions about representations FBI witnesses
made in classified briefings and briefing documents to Congress in 2017.
Horowitz’s report flagged one such possible episode,
recounting a memo that the FBI provided in December 2017 to congressional
leaders that claimed to have dismissed the notion that Steele was the victim of
disinformation.
“According to an FBI memorandum prepared in December 2017
for a Congressional briefing, by the time the Crossfire Hurricane investigation
was transferred to the Special Counsel in May 2017, the FBI did not assess it
likely that the [Steele] [ election reporting] was generated in connection to a
Russian disinformation campaign,” Horowitz noted.
Such a claim may have dismissed or overlooked evidence
sitting in the FBI’s own files, the report suggested.
When pressed by the IG about the possibility that Steele had
been the victim of Russian disinformation, Priestap, the former
counterintelligence chief whose supervised the lead case agent Peter Strzok,
offered an uncertain answer.
“I'm struggling, with, when you know the Russians, and this
I know from my Intelligence Community work: they favored Trump, they're trying
to denigrate Clinton, and they wanted to sow chaos. I don't know why you'd run
a disinformation campaign to denigrate Trump on the side,” Priestap answered.
Steele broadly defended his work in an interview with the
IG. And after Horowitz's report was issued, the former British spy issued a statement
through his lawyers and his company Orbis Business Intelligence disputing many
of the IG's findings, including the allegation that Steele's primary
sub-source had disowned or denied much of the information attributed to him in
the dossier.
"Public discussions about a source are always fraught
with danger for the source and the source's sub-source," the statement
said. "Had Orbis been given an opportunity to respond in a private
session, the statement by the primary sub-source would be put in a very
different light."
Horowitz isn't the only government official to raise
concerns that Steele may have been victimized by Russian disinformation. One of
the Democrats' star witnesses during President Trump's impeachment investigation,
government Russia expert Fiona Hill, testified about Steele
that she had "misgivings and concern that he could have been played" by
Russian disinformation. Hill had previously worked with Steele when he was with
MI6.
“Their goal was to discredit the presidency,” she testified
in an October deposition. “Whoever was elected president, they wanted to weaken
them. So, if Secretary Clinton had won, there would have been a cloud over her
at this time if she was President Clinton. There’s been a cloud over President
Trump since the beginning of his presidency, and I think that’s exactly what
the Russians intended.”
The new evidence from the declassified footnotes will give
the American public a first chance to evaluate whether the FBI dropped the ball
on evaluating Russian disinformation in the Steele dossier.
Whatever the final verdict, the upcoming declassifications
are a pointed reminder that the public still has much to learn about what did,
and did not, go right in the Russia collusion probe.
______________________________
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