2 senators make criminal referral in Russian probe
They urge Justice inquiry into ex-spy whose notes implicated Trump camp
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.
Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a senior committee member, told the Justice Department that they had reason to believe that a former British spy, Christopher Steele, lied to federal authorities about his contacts with reporters regarding information in a dossier, and they urged the department to investigate.
Justice Department spokesman Sarah Isgur Flores said Friday that the department had received the referral and will review it.
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 dossier that purported to detail Russia’s interference and the complicity of Donald Trump’s campaign.
The decision by Grassley and Graham to single out the former intelligence officer behind the dossier — and not anyone who may have taken part in the Russian interference — infuriated Democrats and raised the stakes in the growing partisan battle over the investigations into Trump, his campaign team and Russia.
“It’s clearly another effort to deflect attention from what should be the committee’s top priority: determining whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the election and whether there was subsequent obstruction of justice,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, who added that she had not been consulted about the referral.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, another Democrat on the committee, called the move a partisan effort “aimed at someone who reported wrongdoing, rather than committed it.”
“These vaguely stated, secret allegations seem designed more to distract attention from the priority issues for investigation, and discredit the FBI and other law enforcement,” Blumenthal said in a statement, noting that the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference and the Trump campaign was “triggered by information completely independent” from the dossier, Steele or Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired him.
The Judiciary Committee has not interviewed Steele. A release from the committee said the referral, which is based on both classified and publicly available information unearthed by investigators, does not pertain to the veracity of claims in the dossier.
“The referral is for further investigation only, and is not intended to be an allegation of a crime,” the committee’s release said.
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.
BEYOND THE DOSSIER
The criminal referral makes no assessment of the veracity of the dossier’s contents, much of which remain unsubstantiated nearly a year after the dossier 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 counterintelligence investigation 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 that 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 U.S. and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the investigation say 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 U.S. 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 that were 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.
Two Trump associates — Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, and George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign aide — have pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in the investigation led by the special counsel, Robert Mueller.
Steele had repeated contacts before and after the election with FBI counterintelligence agents who were investigating links between the Trump campaign and Russians.
The information he shared was apparently valuable enough that the FBI at one point even considered taking him on as a paid source. They backed off the idea only after the dossier became public last January and Steele’s identity became widely known, leading the bureau to conclude that he would no longer be able to function as a source for its investigation.
More recently, Steele has been in contact with Mueller, who took over the investigation last year.
Anyone can make a criminal referral to the Justice Department, which is not obligated to take up the matter. But a recommendation from a senior senator who runs the committee that has oversight of the department comes with added weight.
Fusion GPS characterized the recommendation to charge Steele as a smear and an attempt to further muddy the inquiry into Russia’s interference.
“Publicizing a criminal referral based on classified information raises serious questions about whether this letter is nothing more than another attempt to discredit government sources, in the midst of an ongoing criminal investigation,” said Joshua Levy, the lawyer for Fusion. “We should all be skeptical in the extreme.”
Grassley is overseeing an array of inquiries related to the FBI and its investigations of the Trump campaign and of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He and Graham have repeatedly pressed the agency on its handling of the dossier in particular and fought to gain access to key agency witnesses and documents about the matter, reviewing a large amount of such material in recent weeks.
Fusion GPS hired Steele, a former officer of Britain’s MI6 with deep connections in Russia, in the spring of 2016 to research Trump’s ties to Russia. His findings were ultimately compiled into 35 pages of memos outlining a multipronged conspiracy between the Russian government and the Trump campaign to boost his candidacy and hurt Clinton, including corrupt business dealings and salacious but, like the other details in the dossier, unsubstantiated anecdotes alleging an encounter between Trump and Russian prostitutes.
The firm was first hired by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, in September 2015. Its work was later funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, which paid for Steele’s work.
This week has seen Grassley engage in a heated spat with Fusion over the testimony of one of its executives, Glenn Simpson. It began when Simpson and his partner, Peter Fritsch, published an op-ed in The New York Times accusing Republicans of waging “a cynical campaign” to try to discredit the firm and its findings and calling on the relevant congressional committees to release transcripts of a series of private interviews with the men.
A spokesman for Grassley, Taylor Foy, shot back, saying Simpson had declined to provide public testimony or additional documents and answers requested after the interview.
SESSIONS’ RECUSAL
On Thursday, the Times reported that Trump had tried to keep Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a vocal and loyal supporter of his election bid, in charge of the investigation into his campaign. That gave Mueller yet another avenue to explore as his prosecutors work to untangle potential evidence of obstruction.
The federal investigation already includes a close look at whether Trump’s actions as president constitute an effort to impede that same probe. Those include the firing of FBI Director James Comey, an allegation by Comey that Trump encouraged him to end an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and the president’s role in drafting an incomplete and potentially misleading statement about a 2016 meeting with Russians.
The latest revelation — that Trump directed his White House counsel, Don McGahn, to tell Sessions not to recuse himself from the Russia investigation — is known to Mueller’s investigators, who have interviewed many current and former executive branch officials. It adds to the portrait of a president left furious by an investigation that he has called a hoax and suggests that he worked through an intermediary to keep the inquiry under the watch of an attorney general he expected would be loyal.
Three people familiar with the matter confirmed to The Associated Press that McGahn spoke with Sessions just before Sessions announced his recusal to urge him not to do so. One of the people said McGahn contacted Sessions at the president’s behest. All three spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid publicly discussing an ongoing investigation.
“What this adds that is new is that he took action to prevent, to attempt to prevent, Sessions from recusing himself,” said Notre Dame criminal law professor Jimmy Gurule, a former federal prosecutor. “So now we go simply beyond his state of mind, his personal beliefs, to taking concrete action to attempt to prevent Sessions from recusing himself.”
Trump and his lawyers have repeatedly maintained that he did nothing improper and that, as president, he had unequivocal authority to fire Comey and to take other actions.
They also argue that the president was empowered to want the attorney general he appointed to oversee the Justice Department’s Russian meddling investigation or, as McGahn contended to Sessions, that there was no basis or reason at that time for the attorney general to recuse himself.