Senators Clash Over Impact of Wiretap Flaws on Broader Russia Inquiry

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/us/politics/horowitz-fbi-fisa-hearing.html

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WASHINGTON — A top Senate Republican sought on Wednesday to use an inspector general’s scathing findings about one aspect of the Trump-Russia investigation — major flaws in how the F.B.I. presented evidence to get court permission to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser — to discredit the entire inquiry.

But Democrats pushed back, emphasizing that the botching of the wiretap applications — while both serious and cause for weighing changes to the surveillance system — could not legitimately serve as a stand-in for the broader inquiry, which was eventually taken over by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

In his second Senate hearing in a week, the Justice Department inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, largely repeated what he said last week to the Judiciary Committee, and Wednesday’s proceedings before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee played out with less drama. The morning hearing was also overshadowed by the debate in the House on the other side of the Capitol dome ahead of its vote on articles of impeachment against President Trump.

But the partisan furor surrounding that effort wafted into the Senate hearing as well.

The committee’s Republican chairman, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, opened the hearing by declaring that the problems that Mr. Horowitz uncovered with applications to eavesdrop on the former Trump adviser, Carter Page, meant that F.B.I. officials should have quickly closed the entire Russia investigation, called Crossfire Hurricane inside the bureau.

“Crossfire Hurricane should have been shut down within the first few months of 2017,” Mr. Johnson said. “Had the public known what the F.B.I. knew at that time, it’s hard to imagine public support for continuing the investigation, much less the appointment of a special counsel four months later.”

Mr. Horowitz told Mr. Johnson that there were serious questions about why the F.B.I. had continued to seek renewals of court permission to wiretap Mr. Page, noting that at one point in 2017 F.B.I. agents themselves acknowledged they were getting little information of value from the surveillance. But he did not directly address the chairman’s conflation of the wiretap with the larger investigation, which ultimately comprised nearly 500 search warrants and hundreds of court orders for communications records.

Still, in an exchange with the top Democrat on the committee, Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, Mr. Horowitz said the problems that surfaced in early 2017 had no impact on the bureau’s separate efforts to understand links between Russia and three other Trump associates: Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman; Michael Flynn, his national security adviser; and George Papadopoulos, a campaign foreign policy aide.

“We did not see information from the Carter Page events and the FISA as infecting the others,” Mr. Horowitz said, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He added, “As to the other three, we didn’t see any connection between this and the others.”

Mr. Page was never charged with a crime, and only a few pages of Mr. Mueller’s eventual report discuss him. By contrast, the other three Trump campaign associates who drew scrutiny were all convicted of felonies. But none of them were subjected to FISA surveillance.

Mr. Horowitz’s report has given both Republicans and Democrats material they can point to as political vindication. While he found serious problems with the Page wiretap applications, he also said he found no documentary or testimonial evidence that senior F.B.I. officials, including some who had disparaged Mr. Trump in text messages, based any investigative actions on their political views.

And Mr. Horowitz reaffirmed that the F.B.I.’s decision to open Crossfire Hurricane in July 2016 met legal standards, and that a notorious dossier of political opposition research about purported links between the Trump campaign and Russia gathered by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, played no role in that step.

Still, Mr. Horowitz concluded that the dossier did play an “essential” role in the decision to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to eavesdrop on Mr. Page’s phone calls and emails, and he found numerous inaccuracies, material omissions and unsupported statements in the F.B.I.’s portrayal of the facts surrounding Mr. Page.

The department in turn passed that misleading portrait onto the court, which on Tuesday rebuked the F.B.I. and ordered it to submit a proposal to fix its process by Jan. 10.

For example, in January 2017, as law enforcement officials were preparing to seek renewal of the wiretap order, officials learned of a potential problem with some claims about Mr. Page that came from the Steele dossier.

When agents talked to Mr. Steele’s source for those claims, he contradicted what Mr. Steele had written in the dossier. But rather than alerting the court to that disconnect, the F.B.I. reported only that the agents had talked to him in their effort to corroborate the dossier and found him cooperative and honest, leaving a misleading impression.

Stuart Evans, the top Justice Department official overseeing the wiretap applications, told Mr. Horowitz that he was not aware of the inconsistencies, either. If he had known, Mr. Evans said, he would have told the court at a minimum, and might have delayed or abandoned the filing of the next renewal application, according to the report.

Mr. Horowitz found no evidence that senior F.B.I. officials were aware of the problems. But the inspector general faulted the senior officials as responsible for a dysfunctional culture in which case agents and their supervisors put forward inaccurate and incomplete accounts.

Mr. Horowitz has said his team will now begin an audit of unrelated FISA applications from both counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations to see if the factual portraits as assembled by case agents and their supervisors, which the Justice Department then passed onto the FISA court, were accurate and complete.

“If you look at the others and you find similar errors and bad explanations there, it may be one answer,” Mr. Horowitz said. “Frankly, if you find no other errors there, that would be particularly concerning, right, as to this one. Why then in this one?”