EXCLUSIVE: Congressional
investigators tell Fox News that Tuesday’s seven-hour interrogation of
Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe contained numerous conflicts with the
testimony of previous witnesses, prompting the Republican majority staff
of the House Intelligence Committee to decide to issue fresh subpoenas
next week on Justice Department and FBI personnel.
While HPSCI staff would not confirm
who will be summoned for testimony, all indications point to demoted DOJ
official Bruce G. Ohr and FBI General Counsel James A. Baker, who
accompanied McCabe, along with other lawyers, to Tuesday’s HPSCI
session.
The issuance of a subpoena against the Justice
Department’s top lawyer could provoke a new constitutional clash between
the two branches, even worse than the months-long tug of war over
documents and witnesses that has already led House Speaker Paul Ryan to
accuse DOJ and FBI of “stonewalling” and HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes,
R-Calif., to threaten contempt-of-Congress citations against Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
“It’s hard to know who’s telling us the truth,” said one House investigator after McCabe’s questioning.
Fox News is told that several lawmakers participated in the questioning of McCabe, led chiefly by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.
Bruce G. Ohr was demoted at the DOJ for concealing his meetings with the men behind the anti-Trump 'dossier.'
(AP)
Sources close to the investigation say that McCabe was a
“friendly witness” to the Democrats in the room, who are said to have
pressed the deputy director, without success, to help them build a case
against President Trump for obstruction of justice in the
Russia-collusion probe. “If he could have, he would have,” said one
participant in the questioning.
Investigators say McCabe recounted to the panel how
hard the FBI had worked to verify the contents of the anti-Trump
“dossier” and stood by its credibility. But when pressed to identify
what in the salacious document the bureau had actually corroborated, the
sources said, McCabe cited only the fact that Trump campaign adviser
Carter Page had traveled to Moscow. Beyond that, investigators said,
McCabe could not even say that the bureau had verified the dossier’s
allegations about the specific meetings Page supposedly held in Moscow.
The sources said that when asked when he learned that
the dossier had been funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the
Democratic National Committee, McCabe claimed he could not recall –
despite the reported existence of documents with McCabe’s own signature
on them establishing his knowledge of the dossier’s financing and
provenance.
The decision by HPSCI staff to subpoena Ohr comes as he
is set to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is
conducting its own probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Until earlier this month, when Fox News began
investigating him, Ohr held two titles at DOJ: associate deputy attorney
general, a post that placed him four doors down from his boss,
Rosenstein; and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task
Forces (OCDETF), a program described by the department as “the
centerpiece of the attorney general’s drug strategy.”
Ohr will retain his OCDETF title but was stripped of
his higher post and ousted from his office on the fourth floor of “Main
Justice.” Department officials confirmed that Ohr had withheld from
superiors his secret meetings in 2016 with Christopher Steele, the
former British spy who authored the dossier with input from Russian
sources; and with Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, the
opposition research firm that hired Steele with funds supplied by the
Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Subsequently, Fox News disclosed that Ohr’s wife
Nellie, an academic expert on Russia, had worked for Fusion GPS through
the summer and fall of 2016.
Glenn Simpson, shown here, met with DOJ official Bruce Ohr in 2016.
Former FBI Director James Comey, testifying before the
House in March, described the dossier as a compendium of “salacious and
unverified” allegations against then-candidate Donald Trump and his
associates. The Nunes panel has spent much of this year investigating
whether DOJ, under then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, used the dossier
to justify a foreign surveillance warrant against Page, a foreign
policy adviser to the Trump campaign.
DOJ and FBI say they have cooperated extensively with
Nunes and his team, including the provision of several hundred pages of
classified documents relating to the dossier. The DOJ has also made
McCabe available to the House Judiciary Committee for a closed-door
interview on Thursday.
The Justice Department and FBI declined to comment for this report.
James Rosen joined FOX News Channel (FNC) in 1999 and is the network’s chief Washington correspondent.
Jake Gibson is a producer working at the Fox News Washington bureau
who covers politics, law enforcement and intelligence issues.