nationalreview | Did the FBI and Justice Department use Steele’s information to get
the FISA warrant? One certainly hopes not, for two salient reasons.
First, the dossier, particularly as it relates to Page, is incredibly
far-fetched. I am assuming that, at the time it began receiving the
dossier reports, the FBI did not know that Steele was working for the
Clinton campaign — indeed, we do not yet know whether Steele himself
knew who, ultimately, was paying for his work. If the bureau were aware
of the Clinton campaign’s role, using the dossier would be indefensible.
We should assume for now, though, that if investigators were scrupulous
enough to resist seeking a warrant for Page while he was officially
connected to the Trump campaign, they would doubly have avoided using
one campaign’s information as a basis for spying on its opposition.
Nevertheless, the explosive information was unverified. There were
abundant reasons to doubt its veracity when it came to Page. And the FBI
could easily have taken measures less drastic than seeking
court-ordered surveillance; it could, for example, have interviewed
Page, who had cooperated with the FBI in the past.
The second reason to hope the dossier was not used is more alarming. If
the FBI and Justice Department relied on it, this would very likely mean
that they fell victim to an influence operation, based on false
information, by Russian intelligence services. Steele’s sources are
unidentified Russians, at least some of whom knew Steele to be a spy for
hire. It is possible, if not likely, that these Russians fed Steele
false information in order to see if Western intelligence services would
bite and, if the Kremlin got lucky, to sow discord and chaos into the
American political system.
I hope they did not succeed, but we need to find out. One more
disturbing fact: Because Page is a U.S. citizen, the Justice Department
and FBI would have had to show the FISA court not only that he was
acting as a foreign agent for Russia but that his activities involved or
may have involved violations of federal criminal statutes. (See Section
1801(b)(2) of Title 50, U.S. Code.) I don’t know of any basis for
attributing criminal activity to Page other than the Steele dossier —
but, of course, I don’t know everything the FBI knows.
Was the August 2016 decision to spy on a Trump associate based on a
Clinton campaign screed’s claim of a corrupt Trump-Russia deal? Did FBI
and Justice Department officials lose their professional objectivity
because Steele’s information fit their anti-Trump bias? Was the Steele
dossier, in effect, the “insurance policy” Agent Strzok had in mind?
President Trump can provide the answers to these questions: He just
needs to order the FBI and Justice Department, led by his appointees, to
cooperate with Congress’s investigations.
