Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday that FBI officials “misled the hell out of” a Senate committee about the reliability of the Steele dossier during an interview in 2018, citing newly released declassified documents.
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee called on the FBI to testify as part of its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Graham said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” citing documents he obtained through the Department of Justice.
The dossier, compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, served as the linchpin of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants the FBI obtained for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page as part of the agency’s “Crossfire Hurricane” probe.
Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the FBI officials told members of the committee that there was no reason to question the primary subsource or the information he gave to Steele.
But, according to FBI notes released last month, the subsource said the information mischaracterizes claims made by him in the dossier.
“It was Horowitz, during his investigation of the warrant application, found information in 2018 where the FBI was called on the Senate Intel Committee because people were getting suspicious about the subsource … at the Senate Intel Committee level and the FBI was sent over to brief them,” Graham said on the Fox program, referring to Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz.
“And they did to the Senate Intel Committee what they did to the FISA court. They misled the hell out of them. They said there’s no evidence from the subsource to suggest that Steele fabricated anything in the dossier,” Graham said.
According to the document, Graham said, the FBI said that “[a]t minimum, our discussions with [the primary subsource] confirm that the dossier was not fabricated by Steele.”
He continued: “Actually, the subsource said it was all bar talk, hearsay, speculation and conjecture … So they completely misrepresented to the Senate Intel Committee in 2018 what the subsource had told the FBI in 2017.”
Graham, who is investigating the origins of the Russia probe, said he will be asking FBI Director Christopher Wray to “provide me all the details possible about how the briefing was arranged and who provided it.”
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