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“RUSSIA INVESTIGATION” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the Senate section on pages S7017-S7019 on Dec. 12, 2019.
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The publication is reproduced in full below:
RUSSIA INVESTIGATION
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, the chaos in Washington, DC, precipitated by impeachment mania or our inability to get what should be relatively straightforward work done, like the appropriations process and all the gymnastics over the USMCA, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement--in fact, we are coming down to a deadline on Friday, the 20th of December, when the current continuing resolution runs out.
Because of everything that is going on, many people may not have been able to pay that much attention--and I think attention is deserved--to the testimony of Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. I know there was some news coverage of it, but I wanted to give some reflections on the testimony Mr. Horowitz gave.
First of all, the Office of Inspector General is a very important one. They are a watchdog to make sure the laws Congress passes and the rules of the various agencies--in this case, the Department of Justice--are complied with. It is really very, very important.
With everything else going on, it is important to have an impartial inspector general to conduct that kind of investigation and to hold people accountable--something that doesn't happen enough here in Washington, DC.
Inspector General Horowitz, along with his team, was widely praised for producing an outstanding report this time on the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump administration by the Obama-era Justice Department and the FBI.
This is a 480-page report. I have a copy of it right here. It is redacted for public release. If you look at it online--you can look at it through the Department of Justice website--you can see that some of it is redacted or black marks are drawn through parts of it to protect certain classified information.
But there is more than enough information contained in this report to know that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump administration by the Obama Justice Department, including Comey and the FBI, was an unmitigated disaster.
Mr. Horowitz highlighted some of the truly disturbing and alarming facts about how this Russia investigation was conducted--how it was initiated and how it was conducted. There were mistakes made, including some intentional misconduct, which has now been referred to the Justice Department for potential investigation and even charging and prosecution. This was a troubling report, identifying at least 17 different areas of concern.
The report is full of legal jargon, government acronyms, and a long list of names most Americans probably don't recognize. The bottom line is, beneath all of this is a pattern of concerning behavior that ought to concern everyone who cares about civil liberties.
At the core of these issues is, under Director Comey, the FBI's abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. I know people have heard the reference to FISA, and that is short for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In other words, when our intelligence services, including the FBI, gather information, they can't do that on American citizens absent a showing of probable cause in front of a court. That is a protection of our civil liberties. When it comes to foreign intelligence, there is a different court--the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court--that has to assess and judge whether they have met the appropriate legal standards.
The inspector general found that the Comey FBI failed to file accurate applications to surveil an American citizen by the name of Carter Page.
There are very exacting requirements, very technical but very important requirements that the FBI has to put together, in consultation with the National Security Division at the Department of Justice, in order to go to court--the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court--and justify issuance of the authority to gather intelligence on an individual.
In this case, they claimed that Carter Page, who was for a time associated with the Trump campaign--they claim that they suspected him to be an agent of a foreign power--in other words, Russia.
The way these documents were prepared and the way in which this matter was pursued was hardly a stellar performance by the Comey FBI, and I will mention that here in a moment. Once that FISA warrant is issued, as it was on an American citizen--Carter Page--that individual's private communications then come into the hands of the FBI as part of their investigation of a potential agent of a foreign power.
As I said yesterday and reiterated to Inspector General Horowitz this morning--or yesterday morning--spying on an American citizen is not something to be taken lightly. None of us should view this as a trivial matter. That is why there are such strong protections in place to prevent an abuse of power.
One of those backstops is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court--a specialized court appointed by Chief Justice Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, that sits in rotation for a time to look at the government's applications for these warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. You can imagine that when that court makes important decisions involving the national security of the United States or the civil liberties of an American citizen, they need to have a full picture. They need to have the utmost candor exercised by the FBI of all the details and information surrounding the issue at hand. Again, this is no trivial matter. The court is determining whether the government has a compelling case to secretly spy on an American's communications.
Unfortunately, as we heard from Mr. Horowitz, the FBI, under Director Comey, fell dramatically short of that goal. The application for something as serious as a foreign intelligence surveillance warrant should be free from error, let alone intentional lies. Unfortunately, Inspector Horowitz found 17 different instances where the FBI agents involved in securing this FISA warrant failed that standard.
First of all, the inspector general identified 7 mistakes in the original application and an additional 10 in 3 renewals, for a total of 4 separate warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. These applications weren't put together and examined by rank-and-file agents; these errors came from three handpicked teams that didn't raise any red flags for high-level senior officials--something that Mr. Horowitz said made him deeply concerned, which is a feeling I share.
One of the most glaring errors was the applications' reliance on a deeply flawed private intelligence report--opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee--on Donald Trump. This is called the Steele dossier, as people have heard that reference. Mr. Steele is a former intelligence officer who worked for the British Government, the British intelligence services, but he had long since retired from his government service, and now he was out for hire to dig up information--in this case, on a political candidate in the Presidential election in 2016.
One of the biggest concerns we have all had since the 2016 election is Russian interference in our elections. Sometimes this is called active measures, where they merely try to sow discord and dissent by social media use, by propaganda, and by intelligence services leaking information.
I asked Attorney General Barr, before the Judiciary Committee earlier this year, whether he could state with confidence that the Steele Dossier, which we know was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton administration, was not a part of this Russian disinformation campaign, whether he could say it was not. The Attorney General said no, he could not.
FBI attorneys assisting in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation called it a ``close call'' on whether they had sufficient justification to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue a warrant so they could collect intelligence on an American citizen, Carter Page. What made that a close call? What turned a close call into the granting of that authority? Well, it was the Steele dossier. It was a hit piece, really--called that by one of our intelligence agencies--based on internet rumor, not based on verified information. That was used by the Crossfire Hurricane team to apply to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get a warrant issued to surveil and spy on an American citizen.
Although I know that taking a look at the real source of the Steele dossier was outside the realm of the inspector general's duties, it is worth investigating because it played a central and essential role in the FBI's FISA applications. That is what Mr. Horowitz found.
Mr. Horowitz found on one occasion serious and intentional misconduct on the part of an FBI lawyer, and he now has referred that lawyer for criminal prosecution. But the explanations they offered for the other errors were completely unsatisfactory, and they should not be overlooked or excused. Attorney General Barr echoed that in a TV interview earlier this week. I trust him and Mr. Durham to get to the bottom of it. They have more authority than the inspector general to compel the production of evidence in testimony--much like a grand jury, as opposed to what the inspector general had, which was basically a voluntary willingness of witnesses to come forward and to look at the FBI's internal files.
To make matters worse, even as new and exculpatory information--
information that tended to show innocence--came to light on Carter Page, this information was not reflected in what the FBI filed when they requested a foreign intelligence surveillance warrant from the court.
You have to wonder--if this level of mishandling is occurring in a high-profile investigation of a Presidential candidate, someone who would later become the leader of the free world, what kind of protections are in place for average American citizens?
We place an enormous amount of trust in the U.S. Government to keep us safe and also to respect and uphold our constitutional rights. So seeing these types of errors, intentional and unintentional, slipping through the cracks in such a sensitive investigation doesn't give me much confidence that it is not happening in other cases.
Another question I asked the inspector general was on something called defensive counterintelligence briefings. This is a little bit arcane, but let me explain.
There are two different types of investigations by the FBI. One is of a potential criminal prosecution. We are all familiar with that. But the second role that the FBI plays is conducting counterintelligence investigations--in other words, protecting the American people and our national security from the attempts by foreign actors, malign foreign actors to gain intelligence on the U.S. Government and the American people, to our detriment and to the detriment of our national security.
One of the things Loretta Lynch, who was Attorney General under Barack Obama, said is that in a counterintelligence investigation, defensive briefings are routine. In other words, if the Presiding Officer were a target of a Russian intelligence operation--somebody had bumped into you at the grocery store or shown up at your kid's soccer game or perhaps shown up at your work, and you began to wonder, who this person and why have they taken such interest in me?--well, if the FBI discovers information that indicates this is part of an effort to recruit an American citizen to become an asset for the Russian intelligence services, what the FBI is obligated to do is to give a defensive briefing where they might tell the Presiding Officer or me or anybody else who might be targeted ``This is what is happening to you, so be on your guard. Don't think this is innocent. Protect yourself,'' and in so doing, protect the national security of the United States.
These briefings, we learned from Loretta Lynch, are routine. They are given routinely to political candidates, to individuals, and to companies that hear from the FBI about those potential threats so they can take steps to protect themselves.
We know that both Presidential candidates of 2016--Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton--received some kind of defensive briefing in August of 2016, but the so-called defensive briefing for the Trump campaign was unique in a number of aspects.
At the time the FBI believed the Russians were trying to infiltrate the Trump campaign, you would think that would have been a prime opportunity to share that information with Candidate Trump and his campaign so he could tell the people on his campaign: Be on your guard, and don't engage in any unnecessary contact with people whom you don't know and who might have malign motives.
The FBI could have advised the Trump campaign about these potential threats and given them their professional advice on how to mitigate the concerns, but that didn't happen in the case of the Trump campaign. Instead of warning the Trump campaign about possible Russian efforts, they actually inserted--the FBI inserted a case agent into the briefing and used that as an opportunity to collect information in support of their own criminal investigation of GEN Michael Flynn.
It is not only unfair to insert an FBI agent into an otherwise benign setting in order to collect information on an American citizen in a criminal investigation, obviously General Flynn did not know the FBI was trying to do this under a pretext, so he couldn't say: I would like to talk to a lawyer. I would like to know that what I say can't be used against me in a court of law. In other words, all of the normal protections under the Bill of Rights that would be given to somebody under a criminal investigation were not afforded because of this pretextual defensive briefing where the FBI agent slipped in in order to collect information.
Here is the bottom line: This defensive briefing of the Trump campaign lasted a whopping 13 minutes--hardly enough time to convey the sort of information you would want to a political campaign. I can tell you that if the FBI came to me and told me that some foreign actor was trying to infiltrate my campaign, I would want to know about it, and I would want to tell the people who volunteered in the campaign to knock it off. But President Trump, when he was a candidate, was not given that information or the opportunity to shut it down, which he should have been.
Director Wray, to his credit, after hearing about that, has accepted the recommendations of the inspector general and has moved quickly to try to rectify some of these practices, and he has already issued corrective action on them. This doesn't negate the fact that the American people's trust in their government to protect them has been harmed by the Comey FBI.
We need the American people's confidence in the laws the Congress passes, the constitutional rights they enjoy under our Constitution, and the oversight that Congress performs and that the FBI and the intelligence community are going to be required to play by the rules of the road and not jeopardize the civil liberties of any American, much less a candidate for the U.S. Presidency. This is something I will talk about more at another time.
Chairman Graham of the Judiciary Committee assures me that yesterday's very important hearing, at which Inspector Horowitz testified, will not be the last hearing on this matter but merely the first. There is more to come, as there well should be.
I yield floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
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