In an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo this weekend, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said there would be some interesting developments in Congress’s investigation of the Obama administration’s Trump/Russia probe this week. Graham, whose committee has been instrumental in releasing declassified documents from the days of the Russia investigation in recent days, said that the public would soon realize just how deceitful the FBI was in pursuing Trump and his campaign associates.
What did the FBI say to Congress?” asked Bartiromo. “Because I remember John Brennan in testimony to — in front of Trey Gowdy. And he said to Trey Gowdy, we did not use the dossier. It was a small part of the overall mosaic. What about the FBI and what it told Congress? Is lying to Congress a 10-year felony, as Trey Gowdy has said on this program?”
“So, stay tuned. Next week, you are going to learn more,” Graham replied. “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 subsource was truthful and cooperative and Russian-based. The truth of the matter is that the subsource was American-based. He was an employee of Christopher Steele, who was on the payroll of the Democratic Party. And he told Christopher Steele, this is all a bunch of hearsay. And when the FBI understood that the dossier was no longer reliable, they continued to use it. But we also now have found — and this will come out next week — that Congress got suspicious about the Russian subsource and the reliability of the Steele dossier and that members of Congress asked to be briefed about it.
“I will tell you next week what I found,” Graham promised. “And here is what I think I’m going to be able to show to the public. Not only did the FBI lie to the court about the reliability of the Steele dossier, they also lied to the Congress. And that is a separate crime.”
According to released records, Graham is referring to Igor Dancheko when he mentions Steele’s subsource. Dancheko may sound like a perfectly Russian name, but he is in fact based at the Brooking Institute, a wholly American think tank. He doesn’t have any special connection to the government in Moscow, certainly. Moreover, he was up front with Steele about his dossier: That it was simply based on rumor and innuendo – nothing you could base a case on, much less a FISA warrant. But of course, that didn’t stop Steele, the Clinton campaign, the DNC, or the FBI from trying.
“The intelligence community did not want to include the dossier in the intelligence assessment provided to President Trump about the 2016 campaign because they didn’t trust it,” Graham said. “So, they started asking questions at the FBI in 2018 about the subsource and how reliable this information was. And I found the notes that the FBI used to prepare that briefing. Mr. Horowitz told us about them. I found them.
“Stay tuned next week,” Graham repeated. “You’re going to find, not only did the FBI lie to the FISA court, they lied their ass off to the Congress.”
Let’s hope there are consequences for that blatant perjury.
(Not that we’re going to get our hopes up.)
