Senators ask Justice Department to Trump ‘dossier’ author

Two Republican senators have made the first known criminal referral from congressional investigations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, asking the Justice Department to determine whether former British spy Christopher Steele lied to the FBI.

Steele authored a dossier of allegations about President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, a lengthy document including salacious, unsubstantiated charges that he cavorted with prostitutes in Moscow.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham say they’ve referred Steele to the DOJ in connection with false statements he may have made about ‘the distribution of claims contained in the dossier.’

Lawmakers cannot prosecute criminal activity. But they generally refer any criminal violations they find to the Justice Department. The senators said Friday that part of their criminal referral is classified.

Grassley said in a statement that ‘everyone needs to follow the law and be truthful in their interactions with the FBI.’

Steele, a former British spy, was tapped by Democratic opposition research firm Fusion GPS to compile dirt on Trump last year – what became known as the ‘dirty dossier’

Congress and a special counsel have been investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russians to swing the 2016 election to the billionaire

‘Maybe there is some innocent explanation for the inconsistencies we have seen, but it seems unlikely. In any event, it’s up to the Justice Department to figure that out,’ he added.

Graham said separately that he had reviewed ‘how Mr. Steele conducted himself in distributing information contained in the dossier and how many stop signs the DOJ ignored in its use of the dossier.’

The result, he insisted, was the need for a special counsel to review Steele’s conduct.

Democrats were furious that the first criminal referral in what has become known as Russiagate targeted not Trump campaign officials but an investigator who sought to blow the whistle on them. 

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, complained that committee Republicans never consulted her about petitioning the Justice Department for action on Steele. 

‘It’s clearly another effort to deflect attention from what should be the committee’s top priority, determining whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the election and whether there was subsequent obstruction of justice,’ she said.

Two Trump aides, George Papadopoulos (left) and Gen. Mike Flynn (right), have pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and Graham and Grassley say Steele should be held to the same standard

So far two Trump aides, George Papadopoulos and Gen. Mike Flynn, have pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI as a result of the special counsel probe led by Robert Mueller.

Graham may have been referring to the two in suggesting on Friday that Steele should face the same legal standard.

‘If the same actions have different outcomes, and those differences seem to correspond to partisan political interests, then the public will naturally suspect that law enforcement decisions are not on the up-and-up,’ he said.

The murky Democratic political intelligence firm Fusion GPS contracted with Steele to produce the dossier after receiving payments from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which used a law firm as a middle-man. 

GPS Fusion attorney Joshua Levy complained in a statement Friday that ‘after a year of investigations into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the only person Republicans seek to accuse of wrongdoing is one who reported on these matters to law enforcement in the first place.’ 

‘Publicizing a criminal referral based on classified information raises serious questions about whether this letter is nothing more than another attempt to discredit government sources, in the midst of an ongoing criminal investigation. We should all be skeptical in the extreme,’ he said.

Fusion GPS hit back this week publicly at Republican investigators, asserting that the dossier was not the basis for the FBI’s investigation of Donald Trump.

Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch penned an op-ed in The New York Times in which they blasted GOP lawmakers for focusing on them and their research, rather than on a skein of ties between Trump associates and Russia. 

‘We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling,’ they wrote.

Glenn Simpson (left) and Peter Fritsch (right) penned an op-ed in The New York Times blasting Republicans for focusing on them and defending their firm Fusion GPS for hiring Steele

‘As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.’

‘We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter,’

Simpson and Fritsch confirmed their relationship with Steele as well.

‘Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?’ they insisted.

They say they have handed information over to Republican investigators.

‘We handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case,’ they write.

In a court filing on Thursday, Fusion GPS complained about requests from Congress ‘for records of transactions between Fusion and certain media companies, journalists, and businesses.’ 

They say they were shocked by what Steele uncovered, but never themselves went to the FBI.

‘What came back shocked us. Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.’

‘We did not discuss that decision with our clients, or anyone else. Instead, we deferred to Mr. Steele, a trusted friend and intelligence professional with a long history of fworking with law enforcement. We did not speak to the F.B.I. and haven’t since,’ they added.

The firm’s cofounders said they ‘helped’ Steele when he decided to share the dossier with Arizona Sen. John McCain after the election. McCain subsequently brought the dossier to the FBI.

‘The goal was to alert the United States national security community to an attack on our country by a hostile foreign power. We did not, however, share the dossier with BuzzFeed, which to our dismay published it last January,’ they wrote.