During his remote testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, former FBI Director James Comey claimed to know very little about what was happening at the levels beneath him in one of the agency’s more important investigations.
The release of a bombshell Monday from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe revealed that the US intelligence community was aware of a plan approved by Hillary Clinton in July 2016 to smear her opponent, then-candidate Donald Trump, by linking him to Russian interference.
In September of that year, the CIA referred the matter directly to Comey and top counterespionage agent Peter Strzok.
They warned that Clinton was promoting the false claims against Trump “as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server,” Ratcliffe said in his letter to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, the Judiciary Committee chairman.
Although Comey acknowledged reading about it, he drew a blank about the case itself.
“That doesn’t ring bells with me,” he told Graham during the Wednesday hearing.
As to whether his underlings followed up on the referral by investigating Clinton, “I can’t answer that,” he said. “I’ve read Mr. Ratcliffe’s letter, which frankly, I have trouble understanding.”
Comey also said he never recalled discussing with the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigative team—which was using the Clinton-commissioned Steele dossier to pursue eavesdropping warrants against Trump adviser Carter Page—any of the mounting the concerns about the information’s reliability.
“The investigation, overall, was incredibly important,” Comey told Graham. “The piece you’re focused on is important, but it’s a small slice,” he said of the monitoring of Page, an American citizen, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Graham pointed out that the FISA court had later rebuked the FBI for its mishandling of the application process, which came to light with the release of an inspector general’s report in December 2019.
Well after Trump had been elected and the information in the Steele dossier was disavowed by its primary sub-source—himself a suspected Russian agent—Comey seemed to maintain only a passive interest in the work being done under him by Strzok, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and others.
In fact, although Comey long boasted of being a man of the people during his FBI tenure—leaving his seventh-floor hideaway at the J. Edgar Hoover Building to have lunch in the cafeteria with lowly plebeian line-agents and signing off with complete confidence on the work of his subordinates—he testified that he did not even know who FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith was.
“I know nothing about Mr. Clinesmith, other than what I’ve read,” Comey claimed before the Judiciary Committee—despite the fact that Clinesmith, one of several alarmingly biased agents working the case, had led some of the key interrogations with Trump staffers.
Clinesmith, to date, has been the only FBI staffer to face criminal indictment in the ongoing probe being led by US Attorney John Durham.
As outlined in Inspector General Michael Horowitz‘s report, Clinesmith intentionally altered an email from the CIA that provided exculpatory evidence against claims that Page was a Russian agent.
The use of the false information in the Steele dossier and the withholding of critical pieces of exonerating evidence ultimately allowed the FBI to continue spying on the Trump campaign whereas the FISA court claimed it would not otherwise have granted warrant approval.
Comey’s role in the anti-Trump effort became more pronounced in the lead-up to Trump’s 2017 inauguration.
He was present at a Jan. 5, 2017 meeting with then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, national security adviser Susan Rice and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates during which the idea of setting a perjury trap for Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, may have first been discussed.
Yates later testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Comey had gone “rogue” by directing FBI agents to interrogate Flynn at the White House without briefing his own immediate bosses in the Justice Department.
Comey also admitted using his first official meeting with Trump as an intelligence-gathering operation to assess whether the president might be a Russian operative.
When his work and loyalties came under fire, Comey acknowledged leaking the memos from his conversations with Trump in order to help trigger what would become the two-year, $30+ million Mueller investigation, which is now itself under scrutiny by the Durham probe.
“We’re trying to find out … how this happened and to make sure it never happens again,” Graham said in his opening statement.
