Michael Horowitz and the Steele dossier
The Horowitz Report deals in great detail (and in many different places) with the Steele dossier and its use in the Carter Page FISA applications. 1/47 tinyurl.com/toqaslc
Horowitz neither impugns nor endorses the FBI for using the dossier itself. He restricted himself to discussing in detail the way the Bureau handled the dossier. 2/47
Horowitz concluded that the FBI’s errors in the handling of the dossier, while they did not involve malicious or politically motivated intent, were serious enough to merit a disciplinary review of the agents and officers involved in the handling of the applications. 3/47
(Horowitz exonerates the DOJ, because he found that the FBI failed to communicate all the evidence that it should have up the chain of command to the Department, thereby depriving it of all the information it should have had when preparing the FISA applications.) 4/47
There is one specific issue about the Steele dossier, however, which raises concerns about Steele’s sourcing for the dossier. That discussion is found in Sections IV C and D of the Report. 5/47
These are the sections of the report that will probably receive the most fire from the Bureau’s critics.
In fact, it already has received blistering criticism. (See tweet 30 below, on Sen. Lindsey Graham at his presser today.) 6/47
The Report notes that the Steele memos were based on what Steele had been told by a Primary Sub-source. This is probably the individual referred to as Steele’s “collector” in Isikoff and Corn’s book RUSSIAN ROULETTE. 7/47
Simpson said that this collector was well-known to U.S. law enforcement and national security officials, and the Report itself says that the FBI and DOJ found the Primary Sub-source credible. (The FBI interviewed the Primary Sub-source on three separate occasions.) 8/47
(Fn 335 tells us that Steele himself never disclosed the identity of this Primary Sub-source to the FBI, probably because Steele felt he could not trust the agency. Steele certainly had his reasons for distrusting the FBI, but that is another matter.) 9/47
Horowitz doesn’t question the FBI’s use of this Primary Sub-source in the FISA applications (no one has done that), but he does raise questions about Steele’s reporting of what s/he told Steele, and vice versa. 10/47
According to the Report, the Primary Sub-source has said that the Steele memos make what the sub-sources told him (or her) seem much more solid and reliable than was warranted. 11/47
At this point, it all gets quite complicated and messy, and I will leave it to the reader to delve into the mess. I will, however, make three points. 12/47
First, Horowitz is undoubtedly right to fault the FBI for not communicating these details up the chain of command, where it should eventually have gotten to the FISA court. 13/47
However (secondly), it is not all clear that Steele is to blame here, for he regarded what he had been told by the Primary Sub-source as raw intelligence that needed to be confirmed, rather than established facts. 14/47
Steele also had every right to assume that the FBI would see the memos in the same way.
@john_sipher, who worked as a CIA agent for many years, has described the dossier as 15/47
a typical human intelligence (HUMINT) document that would be seen by anyone familiar with such documents as raw intelligence, not findings of fact. 16/47
It is also quite possible that Steele’s way of describing what he had been told by the Primary Sub-source in the dossier is closer to those communications than the way the Primary Sub-source described them to the FBI. 17/47
That is because we learn from the Report that the Primary Sub-source did not know what Steele had done with what she or he had told him until BuzzFeed’s publication of the dossier, 18/47
and s/he would have had good reason to sound more cautious than Steele did in his dossier, or even to distance himself (or herself) from the dossier, after the media firestorm created by the BuzzFeed publication. 19/47
It seems that Steele is sticking by his account of his communications with the Primary Sub-source, and Horowitz himself is unsure how to assess what he sees as a problem. 20/47
21/47 The Report cites a Supervisory Intel Analyst as follows. (Unfortunately, the long footnote 342 has been redacted.)
As I’ve already said, Horowitz is undoubtedly right to say that the issues discussed in this part (and other parts) of the Report should have been presented to the FISA court itself, which has the responsibility of making the final call. 22/47
That said, it still behooves us to ask (third point) whether it was appropriate for the FBI to use the dossier in its application for the Carter Page FISA warrant at all. 23/47
Significantly, Horowitz does not say that the FBI’s use of the Steele dossier itself was improper — despite all the mistakes made in the way the FBI handled it — nor should Horowitz have concluded that it was. 24/47
Nor should we conclude that the FISA court would have, or should have, declined to approve any or all of the FISA warrants if it had known all the details about the dossier that the FBI discovered later but failed to communicate to the DOJ. 25/47
Let us take a specific example: the infamous pee-tape allegation.
The Report says: 26/47
But then there is this footnote (fn. 341): 27/47
Was Steele then not entitled to say that the pee-tape allegation had been confirmed? Well, it seems that it was at least partly confirmed, unless one expects that confirmation requires actually having in hand a videotape of the alleged incident from the Kremlin archives. 28/47
According to the FBI, the dossier was not the only basis for the first Carter Page FISA warrant (or the later ones). But it made the difference, in the sense that without it the application would not have been submitted or approved by the court. 29/47
Lindsey Graham has found this so outrageous that he has denounced the FBI as a “criminal enterprise” because it used the dossier and because of the way it handled the dossier! 30/47
Really, Lindsey? Are you then going to denounce Horowitz when he appears before SJC on Wednesday for not having made any criminal referrals?
If so, that will be interesting to watch. If it happens (which is unlikely), expect Horowitz to stand his ground admirably. 31/47
While there certainly are claims in the dossier that have not held up (something that is quite typical of all HUMINT, including HUMINT from our own CIA), much of it has held up. 32/47
So the question arises: Should the FBI and the FISA court itself dismiss material like the Steele dossier when it decides whether to approve FISA warrant applications? 33/47
Of course not.
If they were to do that, they would have to abjure using the CIA’s intel to “make the difference” in a FISA warrant application — and there are lots of such warrants. 34/47 tinyurl.com/mcujdvy
CIA HUMINT is generally thought to be about 80% accurate. Victoria Nuland, who read hundreds of Steele memos on Ukraine when she was at the State Department, said that Steele’s stuff was as good as the CIA’s. 35/47
Furthermore, the Steele dossier continued to be used in three subsequent FISA applications — warrants that would not have been granted by the court if each of the earlier warrants had not been productive. (The new evidence produced by the warrants is redacted in the Report.) 36/47
Here “productive” also has to be understood in a way that is not limited to the kinds of information or issues that Horowitz deals with in his report. 37/47
As Priestap and others in the FBI have emphasized, the purpose of the FISA warrants was to get information on what active measures Russia might have been using to interfere in and influence the U.S. election, not to get inside political information on the Trump campaign. 38/47
Horowitz has concluded that this was in fact the FBI’s and DOJ’s consistent purpose — a conclusion that is rightly considered to be the single most important finding by the IG. 39/47
It is essential to keep this in mind, because Operation Crossfire Hurricane was a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation. 40/47
Eventually, the most important findings about Trump-Russia probably came from the FBI”s counterintel operation, which was run concurrently with, but independently of, Mueller’s criminal investigation. 41/47
That is why I have posted twice today about how counterintelligence considerations and allusions emerge like tips of an iceberg in the Horowitz Report. 42/47
The Trumpian Right has always claimed that the Russia investigations started before Downer reported his wine-bar conversation with George Papadopoulos in London, and has hinted darkly that the true origins lie further back in time — and with the US intel community. 43/47
This in fact might be what John Durham was referring to in his cryptic (and wholly inappropriate) statement today: 44/47
If Barr and Durham believe that a wider investigation involving “other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.” will discredit the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane even though Horowitz did not, they are going to be sorely disappointed. 45/47
There is simply too much reporting in the MSM (based on leaks) to show that this trail will lead to a very different conclusion. 46/47
Recently, Barr flew to Rome with Durham to find evidence to discredit Crossfire Hurricane, but the Italian government and security services told them they were nuts, basically.
So bring it on, I say. 47/47
