Under oath before a Senate committee, former FBI Director James Comey claimed ignorance of key aspects of the infamous Steele dossier that was funded by the Democratic Party and used by the FBI to obtain warrants to surveil the Trump campaign in 2016.
But in the third day of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, called “Oversight of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” Comey was confronted with his previous testimony.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., pointed out to Comey that the FISA applications to surveil Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page that he signed off on “drew an unprecedented rebuke from the FISA court” that “called into question the reliability of the information proffered in other FBI applications.
“Are you responsible for this misleading evidence given to the FISA court. Yes or no,” Hawley asked repeatedly until Comey finally answered.
“Yes, in the sense of command responsibility. No, in that I didn’t have personal knowledge that would have led me to understand that we weren’t supplying complete information,” Comey said.
But Hawley pointed out that when Comey signed the first Carter Page FISA application, he believed Christopher Steele was working for the Democratic Party.
“I don’t know that I remember he was working for the Democratic Party. I knew that he was working for opponents of Trump,” Comey said.
However, Hawley reminded Comey of his testimony on Dec. 7, 2018, before the House Oversight Committee in which he said, “Steele was retained by Republicans adverse to Mr. Trump during the primary season and then his work was underwritten after that by Democrats opposed to Mr. Trump during the general election season.”
The senator continued: “Now, surely you recognized at the time that relying so heavily on a biased source would undermine public confidence in the FBI’s activities, didn’t you?”
“No, I did not,” Comey replied.
But Hawley noted DOJ lawyer Stuart Evans, the deputy assistant attorney general for intelligence in the Department of Justice, raised concerns about the partisan nature of the source.
“You knew of those concerns before you signed off on the FISA application, didn’t you?” Hawley said.
“I don’t think I knew before. I think I remember reading the footnote that attempted to inform the court of potential bias,” Comey replied.
“No, actually,” the senator said, “the inspector general (Michael Horowitz) found on page 31 of the report, “On Oct. 12, 2016, Evans’ concerns about Steele were briefed to Comey.”
The inspector general’s review of the FBI probe of the Trump campaign found 17 “significant omissions or errors” in the FBI’s applications for warrants to the FISA court. Former special counsel Robert Mueller concluded after nearly two years he could not “establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.”
Hawley also asked Comey if he knew that the allegations in the Steele dossier came from “subsources,” not from Steele’s own knowledge.
Comey said he never asked who the primary subsource was but said there was some effort to “try to replicate Steele’s source network so we could figure out what to make of Steele’s reporting.”
But the IG, Hawley pointed out, said Comey “told us that the application seemed factually and legally sufficient when he read it and he had no questions or concerns before he signed it.”
Last Thursday, a recently declassified footnote im Horowitz’s report was released stating Steele’s primary subsource “was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011 that assessed his/her documented contacts with suspected Russian intelligence officers.” The Crossfire Hurricane team knew as early as December 2016 of the FBI’s assessment in 2009 that the sub-source “may be a threat to national security.”
Hawley asked Comey: “Surely you realize the source’s identity and his motives, this subsource, who we now know may well have been a Russian agent, that would affect his credibility, correct?”
“I thought it was important that we were informing the court of any potential bias from any source,” Comey said.
“So you personally authorized an unprecedented surveillance on an individual associated with a presidential campaign during that campaign’s ongoing time period,” the senator said.
Hawley asked Comey how the American people can trust him or the FBI.
“I disagree extensively with your predicate,” Comey said. “I think the FBI is an organization that is honest, competent and independent, and also flawed because it’s made up of human beings.”
“Well, I have to say,” Hawley replied, “I’m not necessarily worried about the FBI as a whole, I’m worried about you, and I’m worried about what you certified to a court that led the FISA court to conclude that it had been misled repeatedly and that due to the nature of the repeated misrepresentations it could no longer trust what the Federal Bureau of Investigation agency you led, what it said in subsequent cases.
“That I suggest to you is an incredible dereliction of duty, indeed a betrayal of your responsibility as director of the FBI.”
Hawley also asked Comey about a letter from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., regarding an investigative referral from the Intelligence Community to Comey in 2016. The letter, disclosed last week, asked the FBI to look into a Russian intelligence finding that then-candidate Hillary Clinton planned to accuse Republican rival Donald Trump of using Russians to hack DNC servers as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.
Hawley asked Comey if he opened an investigation.
“That does not ring any bells with me when I read that,” he said. “I don’t remember receiving anything that’s described in that letter.”
“I find it extraordinary that a referral from the IC to the FBI regarding HIllary Clinton’s campaign and potential illicit activity received no, no attention from the FBI,” the senator said. “So little attention that the director doesn’t even recall it.
“And yet the director and others had plenty of time to go and seek surveillance warrants during an ongoing presidential campaign. Warrants so flawed that the FISA court has now said it can’t trust what the FBI says in future cases,” said Hawley.
“This is an extraordinary abuse of power, and it’s time we held people responsible for it.”
Late Wednesday, President Trump weighed in on the hearing via Twitter.
“So when will something significant happen to James Comey? Got caught cold,” the president wrote. “He is either very dumb, or one of the worst liars in political history. TOO LONG. EMBARRASSING!”
See the hearing:
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, chastised Comey for dodging questions during the hearing Wednesday.
He said Comey’s promise when the Senate voted to confirm him as FBI director to act in “good faith” had been broken.
“I’m very disappointed to see that those promises now, to me, seem to be very insincere,” Lee said. “Now, Mr. Comey, with all due respect, you don’t seem to know anything about an investigation that you ran.”
Lee lit into Comey for claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin may have secret ties to Trump.
“How can you now as a private citizen and former FBI director show up and then speculate freely regarding any alleged ties between President Putin and President Trump … when you don’t seem to know anything about this investigation that you ran?” Lee asked.
Comey said he can speculate because he has “eyes and ears.”
See Carter Page’s reaction to Comey’s testimony:
The chairman, Graham, said he found it “pretty stunning” that Comey didn’t remember the intelligence community’s referral regarding Clinton.
“Let’s just end with this: You get this inquiry from the intelligence community to look at the Clinton campaign, basically trying to create a distraction accusing Trump of being a Russian agent or a Russian stooge or whatever to distract from her email server problems,” Graham said. “And how far-fetched is that, Mr. Comey, when we now know that the Democratic Party through Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, a foreign agent who had a very strong bias against Trump, who hired Russian sub-source who the FBI believed to be a Russian spy, to compile a dossier that was a bunch of crap to be used an American citizen working for the Trump campaign?”
“You already knew that — seems to me you’d want to investigate other allegations. … You don’t recall this inquiry?”
Comey said “it doesn’t sound familiar.”
Graham continued: “You said you had a duty to look at allegations about the Trump campaign being involved with the Russians. You’ve got a letter now from Ratcliffe saying that they intercepted information about an effort in July where Hillary Clinton approved an effort to link Trump to Russia. … Did you have an investigation to look and see if that was true?”
Comey replied: “I can’t answer that. I’ve read Mr. Ratcliffe’s letter, which frankly I have trouble understanding.”
SUPERCUT!@Comey “can’t recall” anything about the Russia probe he oversaw pic.twitter.com/WxYdih8KCE
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 30, 2020
https://youtu.be/vWziZRkMhfM
