GOP senators target ex-spy who assembled Trump file
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 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 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.
Republicans have 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. But the file has emerged as Exhibit A in Republicans’ insistence that Obama-era political bias could have affected the FBI’s decision to open an 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 that it might have been used by the FBI to open its investigation.
Current and former U.S. 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.