The Incredibly Incurious Mr. Comey The IG report shows investigators who didn’t investigate Steele.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-incredibly-incurious-mr-comey-11576540870?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
James Comey has finally admitted some “sloppiness” over the surveillance warrant for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The former FBI director should re-read Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report because it lays out a record of willful incuriosity about Christopher Steele and his dossier that is hard to credit as mere incompetence.
The report quotes Bill Priestap, a key FBI player in the 2016 Crossfire Hurricane probe into the Trump campaign, that the FBI had “concerns” about Mr. Steele’s “reporting the day we got it . . . [S]ome of it was so sensational, that we just, we did not take it at face value.”
But if the FBI was initially skeptical, it isn’t evident in the IG report. The report shows how the FBI avoided taking any action, or asking any question, that might have undermined its use of the dossier in its application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The Crossfire team obtained Mr. Steele’s dossier on Sept. 19, 2016. The FISA court didn’t grant its warrant on Mr. Page until Oct. 21, 2016, giving it weeks to explore Mr. Steele’s revelations. The former British spook had operated as a confidential FBI source since 2013, which meant he had his own “Delta” file, containing all information concerning sources.
Yet the IG says the FBI didn’t bother looking at Mr. Steele’s file prior to obtaining the first FISA warrant. Even Mr. Steele’s overseas handling agent was astonished at this, telling the IG that the Crossfire team should have “turned the file upside down” two months earlier, when first handling Mr. Steele’s information.
The FBI also waited until November to talk to anyone who had worked with Mr. Steele during his tenure at Britain’s MI6—after the FBI had fired him for talking to the press. Only then did it learn that former colleagues believed Mr. Steele was prone to “rash judgments” and had a “lack of self awareness.” It didn’t bother talking to his primary source until January 2017, when it discovered that much of the reporting Mr. Steele provided was gossip.
The IG confirms that the FBI also made no effort to “determine who was financing Steele’s election related research.” Mr. Steele told the IG he knew who his paymasters were by late July, and Justice official Bruce Ohr told Congress that he warned FBI officials in August that Mr. Steele was hired by somebody “related to the Clinton campaign.” A team of FBI officials interviewed Mr. Steele in early October. Nobody asked about his employer.
Nor did they ask if Mr. Steele had been the source of a Sept. 23, 2016 Yahoo News article that revealed the FBI was looking into Trump-Russia collusion. Various case agents at the time of publication expressed alarm that Mr. Steele was talking to the press (he was), and a draft version of the FISA application fingered him as the leaker. But the IG says nobody at the October meeting asked Mr. Steele if he talked to the press. The final FISA application incorrectly asserted to the court that Mr. Steele had not.
The Crossfire sleuths also went to great effort to deny information to Justice Department attorneys reviewing the FISA application. The IG “did not find any written communications indicating that anyone on the Crossfire Hurricane team advised [Justice] about the potential or suspected political connections to Steele’s reporting.” One Justice lawyer, Stuart Evans, asked the FBI team three times if Mr. Steele “is affiliated with either campaign and/or has contributed to either campaign.”
The Crossfire team answered only the second part of his question, saying that because Mr. Steele was a “foreign national” he was “unable to contribute to either campaign.” Mr. Evans told the IG that he remembered being “frustrated and annoyed” by the answer. The FBI ultimately acknowledged that Mr. Steele was working on “political opposition research,” but rolled past Mr. Evans’s concern that the application was not worth the “risk” of going after such a “politically sensitive” warrant.
Which brings us to Mr. Comey’s incredible incuriosity. Crossfire Hurricane was among the most politically fraught investigations in recent American history. Yet the IG says Mr. Comey recalls few details, says he was only periodically updated on the “status,” and didn’t make any “significant investigative decisions.” This is at odds with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s testimony to the IG that Mr. Comey in spring 2016 went out of his way to “[pull] her aside” to tell her the FBI believed the Russians intended to “use Page for information.”
Had the FBI done even basic due diligence on Mr. Steele, his financiers and sources, it would never have sought a FISA warrant. Mr. Comey and his investigators have more to answer for than sloppiness.
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