Republicans target Trump dossier author

GOP senators claim former British spy Steele lied to authorities

WASHINGTON— More than a year after Republican leaders promised to investigate Russian interference in the presidential election, two influential Republicans on Friday made the first known congressional criminal referral in connection with the meddling — against one of the people who sought to expose it.

Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, chair of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a senior committee member, told the Justice Department they had reason to believe that a former British spy, Christopher Steele, lied to federal authorities about his contacts with reporters regarding information in the dossier, and they urged the department to investigate. The committee is running one of three congressional investigations into Russian election meddling, and its inquiry has come to focus, in part, on Steele’s explosive dossier that purported to detail Russia’s interference and the Trump campaign’s complicity.

The decision by Grassley and Graham to single out the former intelligence officer behind the dossier was certain to infuriate Democrats and raise the stakes in the growing partisan battle over the investigations into Trump, his campaign team and Russia.

More than a year ago, Republican leaders in Congress agreed that committees in the House and Senate would investigate Russia’s efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Graham declared in December 2016, “The first thing we want to establish is, ‘Did the Russians hack into our political system?’ Then you work outward from there.”

Since then, that spirit of bipartisanship has frayed. Congressional Democrats have sought to portray the Trump campaign as eager to take whatever help Russia would provide. Republicans have deflected attention from the central issue and sought to cast doubt on Steele’s dossier and the political research firm that helped produce it, Fusion GPS, whose work was partly funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The criminal referral appears to make no assessment of the veracity of the dossier’s contents, much of which remains unsubstantiated nearly a year after it became public.

But the dossier has emerged as Exhibit A in Republicans’ insistence that Obama-era political bias could have affected the FBI’s decision to open a counter-intelligence investigation in July 2016 into whether Trump’s associates aided the Russia election interference.

Republicans, including the two senators, have argued that the dossier is tantamount to political opposition research, and claimed it might have been used by the FBI to open its investigation. They have also said it might have provided the basis for key investigative actions, including a secret court-approved wiretap of a Trump campaign aide.

Current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the investigation say that the federal inquiry did not start with the dossier, nor did it rely on it. Rather, they have said, the dossier and the FBI’s discussions with Steele merely added material to what American law enforcement and spy agencies were gleaning from other sources.

Grassley’s decision to recommend criminal charges appeared likely to be based on reports of Steele’s meetings with the FBI, which were provided to the committee by the Justice Department in recent weeks.

It was not clear why, if a crime is apparent in the FBI reports reviewed by the Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department had not moved to charge Steele already.

The circumstances under which Steele is alleged to have lied were unclear, as much of the referral was classified.