Sowing the seeds of doubt on the FBI

The FBI has been sullied — and that’s a win for Donald Trump.

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania at Trump International Golf Club in Florida. Picture: AP

Donald Trump has already achieved what he wanted to as he watches Washington tear itself apart over claims made about the FBI in the controversial Republican memo. No matter what transpires in the days ahead, the US President knows that he has sown the seeds of the bigger argument that he will use to defend himself against the eventual conclusions of the Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.

This is no small thing. If Trump can convince his support base that the FBI is a Democrat-leaning ­organisation that embarked on a politically motivated witch-hunt against him, then he will use that directly against Mueller and his team, regardless of their findings and regardless of whether there is credible evidence of bias.

The public disassembling of the FBI’s reputation is the best and only weapon the President has against Mueller and that is why the Republican Party is now waging such an enthusiastic open war against the bureau.

House Speaker Paul Ryan told what was arguably the biggest porky in Washington late last week when he said that the release of the memo “does not impugn the Mueller investigation or the Deputy Attorney-General”.

In fact, the whole aim of the memo, written by the Republican-majority house intelligence committee, is to impugn the Mueller investigation, albeit indirectly.

Trump himself has started the process of linking the memo with the ongoing Mueller investigation, tweeting: “This memo totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe. But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their (sic) was no Collusion and there was no obstruction (the word now used because after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!”

GRAPHIC: Trump-Russia probe

The impact of the memo’s ­release in Washington has been to further polarise an already polarised political landscape.

Democrats have dismissed it as a political stunt, with Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the house intelligence committee, describing it as “a shameful effort to discredit these institutions, undermine the special counsel’s ongoing investigation, and undercut congressional probes”. Republicans have treated the memo as a defining moment in the Russia investigation, with one Republican congressman, Steve King, describing it as “worse than Watergate”.

In reality, the memo is neither the non-event that Democrats ­expected nor the smoking gun that Republicans had hoped for. But it does raise important questions about FBI procedures and whether the bureau did enough to ensure that it was not used for political pur­poses by those with links to the then Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton. These ­deserve to be examined further.

The central allegation made in the memo is that in October 2016 — weeks before the US presidential election — the FBI used information compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, to apply for a warrant to conduct surveillance on a then Trump adviser called Carter Page about his links with Russian officials.

The memo alleges that the FBI, in making this application under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, failed to disclose to the judge that Steele was working for a firm hired by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Nat­ional Committee to conduct research into Trump.

“The ‘dossier’ compiled by Steele on behalf of the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application,” the memo states. It further states that the “(then FBI) deputy director (Andrew) McCabe testified before the committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought ... without the Steele dossier information”.

The FISA application against Page was approved, so the contention from Republicans is that the FBI won legal approval to spy on a Trump adviser on the basis of research funded by Trump’s Democratic rivals. It is a grave claim, but it is also one that is in dispute.

Both the FBI and the Democrats opposed the release of the memo on the grounds that it allegedly cherry-picks intelligence to frame an inaccurate and damaging case against the FBI.

The memo was written by the house intelligence committee’s Republican chairman Devin Nunes based on intelligence provided to the committee by the FBI and the Justice Department as part of the committee’s own Russia investigation, which is separate from the Mueller probe.

When Republicans on the committee saw the link between Steele and the FBI’s FISA application, Nunes wrote what he claimed was a summary of that evidence into the memo and ­pushed to have it released with Trump’s approval.

In the days leading up to its release, Trump-appointed FBI chief Christopher Wray reviewed the Nunes memo and saw that it was alleging that the FBI was either incredibly sloppy in its behaviour or politically biased against Trump.

Wray took the unusual step of issuing a statement, saying: “We have grave concerns about ­material omissions of fact that ­fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” Because the material is classified, the FBI cannot state which parts of the memo are allegedly ­inaccurate, meaning that the claims made in the memo are difficult to refute.

However, Democrats who are on that committee and who also saw the same intelligence on which the memo is based argue that the information provided by Steele did not form “an essential” part of the FISA request. They say that it was part of a raft of evidence presented to FISA to support the warrant application. They also argue that FBI deputy McCabe did not claim that the Steele information was the key driver of the warrant application.

“The Russian government waged a massive campaign to discredit our election,” says Jerry Nader, the Democrat on the house judiciary committee who also reviewed the intelligence on which the memo was based. “Carter Page appears to have played a role in that effort. The FBI has a responsibility to follow these facts where they lead. The Nunes memo would have us sweep this all under the rug. And for what, exactly?”

But even if the Democrats are right and the Steele dossier was not the “essential part” of the FISA application, this does not exonerate the FBI from its basic requirement to fully disclose any political links to the research that it presented to the FISA court.

As The Wall Street Journal wrote (in words that Trump retweeted to his 47 million Twitter followers): “The four-page memo reports the disturbing fact about how the FBI and FISA appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath ... the FBI failed to inform the FISA court that the Clinton campaign had funded the dossier ... the FBI became a tool of anti-Trump political actors. This is unacceptable in a democracy and ought to alarm anyone who wants the FBI to be a nonpartisan enforcer of the law ... the FBI wasn’t straight with congress, as it hid most of these acts from investigators.”

The memo is the latest in a ­series of claims which have undermined the bureau’s nonpartisan reputation. The abrupt resignation of FBI deputy chief McCabe last week came ahead of a report by the Justice Department’s inspector-general into the way that he and other colleagues handled investigations into Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.

Trump had questioned McCabe’s impartiality because his wife, Jill McCabe, ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for a Virginia state Senate seat in 2015. using ­almost $US500,000 in funds from a political action committee controlled by the then Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, a close friend of Clinton.

Critics have asked why McCabe, after being appointed FBI deputy in February 2016, went on to oversee the investigation into Clinton’s misuse of a private email server and a separate probe into donations to the Clinton Foundation. McCabe was deputy director when the FBI decided to begin the Russia probe in July 2016 but it was not until October 2016 that he recused himself from the Clinton probes.

It is unclear what the inspector-general will conclude, but McCabe’s surprise early exit from the job — which came after a meeting with Wray — suggests there is more to come out.

The other uncomfortable issue for the FBI is the ongoing revelations regarding FBI agent Peter Strzok. Strzok was the agent who was removed from Mueller’s investigations team last year after it was discovered he sent numerous text messages to his mistress, FBI agent Lisa Page, in which he repeatedly attacked Trump.

The memo reveals that it was Strzok who oversaw the opening of the Russia investigation in July 2016.

These three issues — the FISA warrant, the McCabe conflict of interest and the behaviour of Strzok — have combined to damage the FBI’s reputation for impartiality. But the memo also undermines Republican claims that the FBI’s decision to launch the Russia investigation was politically motivated.

By its own account, the memo confirms that the Russia investigation was not triggered by Democrat-funded information such as that provided by Steele. Rather it says it was triggered by comments made by former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. ­

Papadopoulos told the then Australian high commissioner to London, Alexander Downer, over drinks that Russia had dirt on Clinton. Australia eventually ­relayed this information to the US government, which passed it on to the FBI.

Former CIA director John Brennan, who ran the CIA during the 2016 election campaign, said yesterday that the Steele dossier played “no role whatsoever” in the broader assessment by US intelligence agencies that Russia had ­directly interfered in the US ­election.

He said intelligence agencies had information on “multiple fronts” that Russia had meddled in US politics.

The release of the memo has also increased pressure on Deputy Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein, who has been in Trump’s sights ever since Rosenstein appointed ­Mueller as special counsel last year. When asked at the weekend if he had confidence in Rosenstein, Trump said simply: “You figure that one out.”

The attacks on the FBI by both the President and Republicans are set to increase in the weeks and months ahead as the Mueller ­investigation nears its conclusion.

“What makes this a very dangerous moment for the FBI’s independence is that for the first time, they’re being attacked by both the legislative branch and the executive branch,” historian Timothy Naftali, a former director of the Nixon presidential library, told Politico magazine. “They’ve been targeted by presidents, but had the support of congress. And they’ve been targeted by congress, but were supported by the president. Now they’re being attacked by both branches at the same time, and that’s unprecedented.”

Wray, whose appeal not to ­release the memo was ignored by both the President and the Republican committee, now finds himself at loggerheads with Trump only eight months after the President sacked his predecessor, James Comey.

Comey says the fallout from the memo controversy will trigger a trail of destruction that will not be easy to repair.

“Dishonest and misleading memo wrecked the house intel committee, destroyed trust with the intelligence community, damaged relationship with FISA court, and inexcusably exposed classified investigation of an American citizen. For what? DOJ & FBI must keep doing their job,” Comey tweeted.

But Trump says the evidence is now in and that the FBI is tainted.

“The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicised the sacred investigative process in favour of Democrats and against Republicans — something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. Rank and File are great people!” he tweeted.

Swirling above all of these partisan divisions hangs the ultimate question — will the President be content to use the memo only to undermine the Mueller investigation? Or will it embolden him to take one step further and sack the special counsel, a move that would shake American politics to the core?

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.