Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on Sunday that the newly declassified documents handed over to his committee reveal that the FBI deliberately lied to the Senate Intelligence Committee about the discredited Steele dossier.
“This document clearly shows that the FBI was continuing to mislead regarding the reliability of the Steele dossier,” Graham told Fox News. “The FBI did to the Senate Intelligence Committee what the Department of Justice and FBI had previously done to the FISA court: mischaracterize, mislead, and lie.”
Graham’s committee released a series of documents last month that “significantly undercut” the “reliability” of the Steele dossier, which was the basis for the phony investigation Democrats relied upon to launch the debunked Russian collusion conspiracy.
The first document revealed that Steele’s primary sub-source “disagreed with and was surprised by” the way Steele conveyed his intel in the dossier.
The second declassified document obtained by the committee contains type-written notes by former FBI special agent Peter Strzok, in which Strzok disagrees with certain assertions made in a New York Times article about the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia.
In the notes, Strzok admits that “recent interviews and investigation … reveal Steele may not be in a position to judge the reliability of his sub-source network.”
Strzok also wrote that “the FBI may have been using foreign intelligence gathering techniques to impermissibly unmask and analyze existing and future intelligence collection regarding U.S. persons associated with the Trump campaign,” referring to former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
In short, these documents prove that the FBI’s “characterizations regarding the dossier were completely out of touch with reality in terms of what the Russian subsource actually said to the FBI,” Graham explained.
“What does this mean? That Congress, as well as the FISA court, was lied to about the reliability of the Russian subsource,” Graham continued. “Somebody needs to go to jail for this. It’s just amazing the compounding of the lies.”
