Attorney General William Barr accused special counsel Robert Mueller of failing to investigate evidence that British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s salacious and unverified dossier may have been compromised by a Russian disinformation campaign.
In an interview Thursday with Catherine Herridge of CBS News, which followed the Justice Department’s move to drop its Mueller spinoff prosecution of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, Barr was asked to comment on how recently declassified footnotes from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI’s Russia inquiry “suggest that the Steele dossier was likely the product of Russian disinformation” and that “there were multiple warnings to the FBI at that time, yet they continued to use that.”
For an explanation, Barr pointed to Mueller.
“I think that’s one of the most troubling aspects of this whole thing, and, in fact, I said it in testimony on the Hill. I can’t remember if it was my confirmation, that I said I was very concerned about the possibility that that dossier and Steele’s activities were used as a vector for the Russians to inject disinformation into the political campaign,” Barr said. “I think that is something that Robert Mueller was responsible for looking at under his charter, which is the potential of Russian influence. But I think it was ignored and that there was mounting indications that this could very well have been happening, and no one really stopped to look at it.”
Mueller was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey and the leaking of portions of Comey’s memos to the press in an effort he said was designed to prompt the appointment of a special counsel.
Rosenstein’s first scope memo for Mueller authorized him to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” and “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” Rosenstein said Mueller was being picked “to ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”
There is little indication that Mueller investigated possible Russian disinformation in Steele’s dossier.
But U.S. spy agencies assessed that Russian intelligence services were aware of Steele’s investigation into then-candidate Trump during the summer of 2016, and at least one of his subsources supported Hillary Clinton, recently declassified notes showed. These footnotes, which appeared in the DOJ watchdog’s report, provided further evidence that Moscow was aware of Steele and may have been attempting to compromise his dossier with Russian disinformation.
“An early June 2017 [U.S. intelligence community] report indicated that two persons affiliated with [Russian intelligence services] were aware of Steele’s election investigation in early July 2016,” one footnote said.
The same footnote, which remains partially redacted, also revealed that, in late January 2017, a member of the Crossfire Hurricane team received word that Russian intelligence services “may have targeted” Steele’s private firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, and that the Russians attempted to “research all publicly available information” about Steele’s company. FBI investigators received information in 2017 “indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting” seemingly related to the biggest salacious and unverified claims in Steele’s dossier: Trump fooling around with prostitutes in Moscow during the Miss Universe Pageant in 2013 and Trump lawyer Michael Cohen meeting with Russians in Prague in 2016.
Horowitz’s lengthy December report criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page and for the bureau’s reliance on Steele’s salacious and unverified dossier. Steele put his research together at the behest of opposition research firm Fusion GPS, funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm. Horowitz also criticized the bureau for not sharing exculpatory information from confidential human sources with the FISA court.
Mueller’s 448-page report, released in April 2019, said the Russians interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion,” but it “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia. No one was charged with crimes related to Russia collusion.
In their interview, Herridge pressed Barr to assess what motivated the investigators.
“These are very smart people who were working in the special counsel’s office and in senior levels of the FBI — so what drove them here?” she asked.
“Well, I think one of the things you have to guard against, both as a prosecutor and, I think, as an investigator, is that, if you get too wedded to a particular outcome and you’re pursuing a particular agenda, you close your eyes to anything that sort of doesn’t fit with your preconception,” Barr said. “And I think that’s probably the phenomenon we’re looking at here.”
House Intelligence Committee witness interview transcripts, which were released to the public on Thursday, showed President Barack Obama’s spy chief and other top national security and law enforcement officials from his administration testified that they did not see direct evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.
The attorney general also shed some light on the Justice Department’s decision to drop its case against Flynn over false statements he’d allegedly made to FBI agents in January 2017 related to his conversations with Russia’s ambassador.
“But it’s on the question of materiality that we feel really that a crime cannot be established here because there was not, in our view, a legitimate investigation going on,” Barr said. “They did not have a basis for a counterintelligence investigation against Flynn at that stage, based on a perfectly legitimate and appropriate call he made as a member of the transition.”
