Former FBI director James Comey will make his long-awaited appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday to answer questions regarding the FBI’s actions in the early stages of the Russia investigation.
Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has spent months criticizing the bureau for inaccuracies and omissions in court filings used to obtain warrants to monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the FBI’s reliance on ex-British spy Christopher Steele’s dossier, which had been debunked by Steele’s own sub-source during an FBI interview.
Graham has speculated that the lower-level FBI employees who conducted the interview with the sub-source were not the only ones who knew that the sub-source said the information in the dossier was unreliable.
“We’re not going to let the system blame some low-level intel analyst or case agent for defrauding the court,” Graham told Fox News in June. “I believe it goes to the very top, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it and that means Sally Yates and [Rod] Rosenstein, and [Andrew] McCabe and Comey are all going to come before the committee and they’re going to be asked, ‘What did you know and when did you know it?’”
The details of the FBI’s activities related to its use of the dossier for obtaining a warrant (and subsequent warrant renewals) from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were revealed by a Justice Department Inspector General’s report.
Attorney General Bill Barr revealed in a letter to Graham last week that a previously classified footnote in that report contained information related to the dossier’s reliability, particularly regarding the sub-source.
“A footnote in the Inspector General's report contains information, which up till now has been classified and redacted, bearing on the reliability of the Steele dossier," Barr wrote. "The FBI has declassified the relevant portion of the footnote, number 334, which states that 'the Primary Sub-source was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011 that assessed his or her contacts with suspected Russian intelligence officers.'"
Fox News reported in July that the primary source of Steele’s election reporting was not a current or former Russian official, but a non-Russian-based contract employee of Steele’s firm. Fox News also reported in July that the information the source provided Steele that served as the basis of the dossier was “second and third-hand information and rumors at best.”
Comey has gone on record in the past claiming that the FBI “did not intentionally commit wrongdoing” but described the FBI's failures as "real sloppiness."
Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
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