Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley provide zero evidence in their letter to Rod Rosenstein that Steele ever lied to, or broke an agreement with, the FBI
(THREAD — 52 tweets) Notes on the Grassley-Graham Memorandum to Rod Rosenstein dated 4 Jan 2018.
1/ A copy of the Memorandum that is much less heavily redacted than the one originally released was released yesterday. tinyurl.com/yauksgjs
2/ Fn. 7 on p. 3 of the Memorandum says: “
3/ Since much of p. 3 of the Memorandum is redacted, it is not 100% certain what this footnote refers to in the Memo, but it almost certainly refers to the part of that page (the lower half) that begins:
4/ It is this part of the letter that begins the Memorandum’s attack on Steele’s alleged mendacity, and culminates in the referral to the DOJ
5/ for investigation of possible violations of 18 U.S. Code § 1001 (knowingly and willfully making false or fraudulent statements etc.) by Steele.
6/ In other words, as of the date of this Memorandum (4 Jan 2018), the Senate Judiciary Committee did not know (and apparently still does not know) exactly what the FBI said to Steele; what Steele said to the FBI; and what agreement (if any) there was between them.
7/ It is important to keep in mind that there was likely no formal agreement between the two parties —
8/ principally because there was no party for Steele to negotiate with, but rather a politically divided FBI that was either pro-Trump and anti-Clinton, or pro-Clinton and anti-Trump
9/ (though Steele himself apparently did not recognize the strength or even the existence of a pro-Trump and anti-Clinton faction within the FBI until later).
10/ There was also undoubtedly a third party within the FBI, at least in the early days, that didn’t know what to do about the Trump campaign and its possible collusion with the Russian government,
11/ since that raised very troublesome political problems for U.S. law enforcement that it had never had to face before.
12/ As for the pro-Clinton camp (and especially with reference to the dossier): In an article dated 2 Feb 2018,
13/ Michael Isikoff indicates that the “senior U.S. law enforcement official” cited in his path breaking 23 Sep 2016 article in Yahoo News might have been Bruce Ohr, a DOJ official. Ohr was undoubtedly in the pro-Clinton and anti-Trump campaign.
14/ But it is well-known (but not as well-known as it should be) that there was also a zealous pro-Trump and anti-Clinton cabal in the FBI, especially in the New York field office.
15/ I have written about this is in a couple of threads, most recently here (beginning at tweet /67):
16/ See also @SethAbramson:
17/ This helps to put the following passage from the Grassley-Graham Memorandum in better perspective:
18/ Note that the FBI does not say who made the “prior admonishment” or when, and that
19/ it may well have been that there was only a gradual consolidation and hardening of opinion about how to deal with the press that culminated in an October 2016 rupture.
20/ This is confirmed by the fact that the above passage says that the rupture occurred in October, at least a month after Yahoo News published the 23 Sept 2016 Isikoff article.
21/ And even here, the FBI is undoubtedly not telling the whole story when it says that IT suspended its relationship with Mr. Steele (by implication, unilaterally),
22/ because we have Glenn Simpson’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee dated 22 Aug 2107 that it was STEELE who suspended HIS contacts with THEM shortly after Oct 31:
23/ Furthermore, it is very hard to see how the FBI could have felt it was in any position to bar Steele from contacting media in the US about his findings.
24/ Steele knew perfectly well that the FBI had a firm policy of never announcing, admitting, or denying that it was investigating ANYTHING (Comey’s departure from this well-established policy is what got him and the FBI into a lot of trouble),
25/ so Steele knew that all he could do on that front is spark an FBI investigation. (In fact, Comey had opened an investigation in July, but Steele didn’t know that, though he might have been informed of it when he met an FBI contact in Rome on Oct 1.)
26/ But in mid- to late-September, the US was only 4–6 weeks away from an election that looked like Trump might very well win — and Steele was convinced that Trump had been compromised by the Kremlin and was a dire threat to the whole Western alliance.
27/ So why in the world *would* Steele have agreed to a prohibition against contacting US media about his findings? For that matter, why would the FBI even have asked him to do so?
28/ Prima facie, if there was a prohibition, it would have been limited to any disclosure or suggestion that Steele had been in contact with the FBI and/or that the FBI had corroborated any of his findings or initiated any investigations along similar lines.
29/ So Steele’s contacts with Isikoff, WaPo, The New Yorker, and CNN in September must have gone something like this:
30/ STEELE: I am a former MI6 British intelligence officer, and am now working in the field of business intelligence. I am here to report that my intel tells me there is a well-established collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign to swing the election to Trump.
31/ And Carter Page, inter alia, who has been recently in the news because of highly suspect remarks he made at a conference in Moscow in July, is an essential part of this. In fact, my intel has it that Page met in Moscow in July with Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin.
32/ STEELE’S MEDIA CONTACTS (in shock and horror): That’s appalling! Have you notified the FBI?
33/ STEELE: I am not at liberty to tell you whether I have contacted the FBI or not. I do not know what the FBI knows or whether it is even investigating.
34/ I am here to tell you what I have found out. If you want to know what the FBI is doing or knows, you will have to contact them yourself.
35/ Then, either on the initiative of Steele’s media contacts or Ohr’s (or somebody’s) in the Bureau, Isikoff and others learn (from a senior FBI law enforcement officer) that Page is indeed on the FBI’s radar screen.
36/ This is the ONLY possible scenario I can think of that accounts for all the presently known facts.
37/ On the other hand, the narrative that Grassley and Graham have suggested and are trying hard to establish is utterly implausible.
38/ Why would Steele, who had done work for the FBI in the past, and who undoubtedly wanted to maintain good relations for the future,
39/ have promised the FBI that he would not divulge anything about *his* findings and then promptly do that?
40/ That makes absolutely no sense, for Isikoff reported in his Sept 23 article in Yahoo News that Page had been reported (by someone, somehow, somewhen) to have met with Sechin and Divyekin,
41/ and *that* information could *only* have come from the dossier, and of course the FBI would know that.
42/ But according to the only plausible scenario, Steele wouldn’t have broken any agreement with the FBI, *provided* he did not say (or even hint) that he had given the same intel to the FBI — and there is no reason to think that he said or implied that to his media contacts.
43/ So when the FBI asserted (in footnote 19) that it did not believe that Steele “directly gave information” to Yahoo News (referencing Yahoo’s Sep 23 news article),
44/ it may only mean that it was someone else (possibly Bruce Ohr) who leaked that information to Isikoff (in which case *Ohr* could be in trouble).
45/ This is made more likely by the text of the Isikoff article itself, which cites lots of reasons *outside* the dossier for thinking that Page was under investigation (though the intel about Sechin and Divyekin could only have come from Steele).
46/ Yet the gravamen of the Grassley-Graham memo is that there was an agreement between the Bureau and Steele that Steele would not have ANY UNAUTHORIZED (I.E., NOT PRE-APPROVED) CONTACTS WITH THE PRESS *ABOUT THE DOSSIER*):
47/ This strikes me, prima facie, as utterly implausible, and it is significant that the Grassley-Graham Memorandum does not cite any text from the underlying documents to support the assertion.
48/ Without seeing the FISA warrant applications themselves, it is impossible to be absolutely certain about any of this. But there is a probable next-best scenario: the Inspector General’s (Michael Horowitz’s) report which is due out sometime in late spring.
49/ That report, in order to shed any light on the FBI’s handling, mishandling, or non-handling of Weiner’s computer and the Clinton email investigation generally, will have to have investigated the factions involved in the matter,
50/ and that could throw light as well on who was for, and who was against, pursuing the explosive claims made by the Steele dossier.
51/ And that could throw some light as well on how the Steele dossier was handled by the FBI when writing the the DOJ’s FISA warrant applications. END
