U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham promised on Fox News “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo yesterday, to release new information this week on the Steele dossier. Graham told viewers: “Stay tuned next week. You’re going to find, not only did the FBI lie to the FISA Court. They lied their ass off to the Congress.”
Graham said further, “Next week you are going to learn more. Not only do we now know that the FBI lied to the FISA Court about the reliability of the dossier. They told the court that the sub-source was truthful and cooperative and Russia-based. And when the FBI understood that the dossier was no longer reliable, they continued to use it. The truth of the matter was that the source was American-based. He was an employee of Christopher Steele, who was on the payroll of the Democratic Party. And he told Steele, this is all a bunch of hearsay.” Senator Graham said that Congress got suspicious about the reliability of the Steele dossier.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, also on Fox yesterday, announced, “We’ve now expanded our investigation to a full-blown investigation into the Brookings Institution,” with two foci: Whether Brookings, as a tax-exempt entity, had engaged in politics; and “Secondly,” he asked, “they also take foreign money from foreign countries and foreign governments….who were their foreign donors? And are they doing all of this not just to help the Democratic Party, but also any foreign government?” Nunes, now the committee’s ranking member, has further asked whether “there is a connection between the president of Brookings [then Strobe Talbott] and those dossiers that were given to the State Department that mirrored the Steele dossiers.”
“This was the Clinton campaign’s dossiers. It was the dirt, it was a phony story that they sold, not only to the American people, but they sold it and corrupted our FBI where it appears like these dirty cops were more than willing to take this information and present it to the FISA court,” Nunes continued.
Attorney Jonathan Turley, in a July 25 column in The Hill, cited another document apparently released by Graham, to attack the U.S. national media for refusing to cover the complete discrediting of the “Russiagate” investigation of the Trump campaign and Presidency. Turley cited “yet another declassified document” which “shows that FBI officials used a [summer 2016] national security briefing of then candidate Donald Trump and his top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane, its code name for the Russia investigation…. The media covered Obama administration officials ridiculing the suggestions of spying on the Trump campaign and of improper conduct with the Russia investigation. When Attorney General William Barr told the Senate last year that he believed spying did occur, he was lambasted in the media, including by James Comey and others involved in that investigation….
“The new document shows that, in summer 2016, FBI agent Joe Pientka briefed Trump campaign advisers Michael Flynn and Chris Christie over national security issues, standard practice ahead of the election. It had a discussion of Russian interference. But this was different. The document detailing the questions asked by Trump and his aides and their reactions was filed several days after that meeting under Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Razor, the FBI investigation of Flynn. The two FBI officials listed who approved the report are Kevin Clinesmith and Peter Strzok.”
