Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham spoke to Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo, outlining what he has been working in terms of declassifying a sensitive “document” that “definitively proves that authorities knew the Steele dossier — which the FBI used to justify the secret surveillance of a former Trump aide — lacked any substantial independent corroboration.”
The South Carolina Republican Senator also offered some insight into legislation he is preparing to introduce this upcoming Wednesday, which he explained was to stop the “perfect storm” of illegal migration which he called an “invasion” of the United States’ southern border.
Senator Graham predicted that his plan will stop “90 percent of illegal immigration” currently coming from Central America.
“There’s a document that’s classified that I’m gonna try to get unclassified that takes the dossier — all the pages of it — and it has verification to one side,” the Republican told Maria Bartiromo. “There really is no verification, other than media reports that were generated by reporters that received the dossier.”
He continued, “So, the bottom line is the dossier has never been independently confirmed. It was used to get a warrant. They knew the author of the dossier was on the Democrat Party payroll. He hated Trump; they got the warrant anyway. Most Americans should be very upset about that. I’m very upset about it. And we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”
Fox News reports:
On four occasions, the FBI told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court that it “did not believe” former British spy Christopher Steele was the direct source for a Yahoo News article implicating former Trump aide Carter Page in Russian collusion, documents released after a lawsuit showed last year.
Instead, the FBI suggested to the court, the September 2016 article by Michael Isikoff was independent corroboration of the salacious, unverified allegations against Trump in the infamous Steele Dossier. Federal authorities used both the Steele Dossier and Yahoo News article to convince the FISA court to authorize a surveillance warrant for Page.
But London court records show that contrary to the FBI’s assessments, Steele briefed Yahoo News and other reporters in the fall of 2016 at the direction of Fusion GPS — the opposition research firm behind the dossier.
The FISA application also copied and pasted directly from a Washington Post opinion piece that claimed the Trump campaign had “worked behind the scenes” to “gut” the GOP platform on Russia and Ukraine.
The FBI seemingly conducted no independent review of the opinion article’s disputedclaims, which were widely cited as evidence the Trump team was compromised by Russia and working to publicly appease Russian President Vladimir Putin. Despite the brouhaha, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe only briefly mentioned the episode, saying there was no evidence of misconduct when a lone Trump official vetoed a single delegate’s proposed platform change.
The platform change would have called for providing lethal arms to Ukrainians fighting Russians, rather than defensive arms — in a marked change from then-President Obama’s policy that analysts say would have risked escalating tensions with Putin. The Trump administration ultimately did decide to provide lethal arms to Ukrainians later.
The President has promised that he will eventually declassify the entire FISA applications used to spy on Carter Page, in addition to other related documents.
On the flip side, Graham seemed to indicate that the “deep dive” into the investigation of collusion is “currently pending the completion of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s own investigation into alleged FBI and DOJ misconduct during the 2016 presidential campaign.”
“I’m waiting for Horowitz to get his report done,” he said. “But we had a pretty big bombshell this week.”
According to Fox, “Graham specifically cited the report from The Hill’s John Solomon that the FBI was expressly told that Steele, the bureau’s confidenial informant, had admitted to a contact at the State Department that he was ‘keen’ to leak his discredited dossier for purposes of influencing the 2016 election. Steele also acknowledged that his dossier was funded by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton campaign.”
“Christopher Steele was trying to leak it to everybody,” Senator Graham stated.
“But-for the dossier, there would be no warrant against Carter Page,” Graham explained. “The meeting on Oct. 11 was 10 days before the FISA warrant application. So the FBI was on notice that their confidential informant went to the Department of State to urge the Department of State to take the dossier and leak it to the public to affect the election. That’s about as sick as it gets.”
