The Trump administration declassified a new set of documents related to the FBI’s Russia investigation at the request of congressional Republicans, who are ramping up their attacks on the Russia probe ahead of potential Senate testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller.
Attorney General William Barr declassified two additional documents on Friday at the request of Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who subsequently released them. One document is 57 pages of FBI notes from a three-day January 2017 interview with a primary sub-source of Christopher Steele, the ex-British intelligence official who compiled the opposition research dossier on Trump and Russia. The other document is an annotation of a 2017 New York Times article from former FBI agent Peter Strzok taking issue with some allegations in the story.
Neither document provides significant new information about the FBI’s Russia investigation. The issues Steele’s sub-source raises were summarized in last year’s Justice Department inspector general report that detailed numerous problems with foreign surveillance warrants obtained on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, while Strzok’s concerns echo 2017 testimony from former FBI Director James Comey.
But the newly declassified documents add additional details to the understanding of the FBI’s Russia probe, which is being scrutinized by multiple GOP-led Senate committees. The Trump administration has declassified and provided Congress with a plethora of documents related to the origins of the investigation, the prosecution of Michael Flynn and other issues – and the Justice Department signaled additional documents were likely to be produced as the congressional investigations march on.
“After this interview of the sub-source and the subsequent memo detailing the contents of the interview, it was a miscarriage of justice for the FBI and the Department of Justice to continue to seek a FISA warrant against Carter Page in April and June of 2017,” Graham said in a statement Friday.
Graham said this week he will call Mueller to testify before his committee as part of his investigation into the FBI’s Russia probe and the special counsel investigation. “He has a lot to account for,” Graham said of Mueller on a Fox News podcast.
Mueller broke his silence and responded to the attacks on his investigation from the White House and congressional Republicans following Trump’s commutation of the sentence of his longtime friend, Roger Stone. Mueller wrote an op-ed defending the investigation and Stone’s conviction, saying “the women and men who conducted these investigations and prosecutions acted with the highest integrity. Claims to the contrary are false.”
The twin Senate investigations being led by Graham and Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, are jumping off of Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz’s report released in December 2019, which found that the most salacious claims in Steele’s dossier were unproven.
Since the report was released, Republicans have sought additional documents that remained classified, including footnotes in the Horowitz report raising additional questions about the validity of Steele’s claims.
The documents have been declassified by Barr and former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe. Some of the declassified materials, such as a list of Obama administration officials who made “unmasking” requests during the Trump transition – a routine intelligence practice of obtaining the identity of US citizens hidden in intelligence reports – have been used by the Trump campaign to attack Trump’s 2020 opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Horowitz charged that the FBI omitted the January 2017 interview with Steele’s primary sub-source in its renewals of the Page FISA warrant. He wrote that the sub-source was credible and made statement to the FBI “raising significant questions about the reliability of allegations included in the FISA applications, including, for example, that he/she did not recall any discussion with Person 1 concerning WikiLeaks and there was ‘nothing bad’ about the communications between the Kremlin and the Trump team.”
Graham noted that the FBI’s interview notes provided to Congress showed that the sub-source was not well-connected with the Russian government and disagreed with how Steele portrayed the material provided in the dossier.
In the second document, Strzok, the former FBI agent who led the Russia investigation, annotates a New York Times story on repeated contacts between members of Trump’s team and Russian intelligence officials, alleging inaccuracies with several points in the story.
Strzok’s commentary adds more detail to the issues raised about the story, which Comey expressed in June 2017 testimony before a Senate panel. “In the main, it was not true,” Comey said.
While the FBI officials took issue with the story alleging that Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials, it is true that multiple members of Trump’s team communicated with Russians, including those tied to Russian intelligence.
As shown in court filings and the Mueller report, Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort was in contact with Konstantin Kilinmink, a Russian intelligence-linked associate; Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Manafort met with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya and Page met with Russian energy executive Andrey Baranov while in Russia in 2016.
