Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was furious during a Sunday appearance with Fox News’ “Sunday Futures with Maria Bartiromo,” after his committee released a document revealing that the FBI misled the Intelligence Committee during the Russia probe when it claimed that Christopher Steele’s salacious dossier was backed up by one of its primary sources.
“Somebody needs to go to jail for this,” Graham told Bartiromo, adding “This is a second lie. This is a second crime. They lied to the FISA court. They got rebuked, the FBI did, in 2019 by the FISA court, putting in doubt all FISA applications.”
“A year before, they’re lying to the Senate Intel Committee. It’s just amazing the compounding of the lies,” he added.
According to John Solomon of Just The News:
The document in question contains the draft talking points the FBI used to brief the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2018, including an assessment that the primary sub-source of the information contained in the Steele dossier had backed up the former MI-6 agent’s reporting.
The primary sub-source “did not cite any significant concerns with the way his reporting was characterized in the dossier to the extent he could identify it,” the FBI memo claimed. “…At minimum, our discussions with [the Primary Sub-source] confirm that the dossier was not fabricated by Steele.”
What’s more, FBI agents were told by Steele’s primary sub-source that much of the content attributed to him in the dossier was in “jest” or uncorroborated.
The agency was also warned by the CIA that the memos contained Kremlin disinformation – and had even assembled a spreadsheet which debunked, or could not corroborate most of the claims.
And according to Graham, the document is so misleading that he wants FBI Director Christopher Wray to identify those involved in the congressional briefing.
“They misled the hell out of them,” he added.
More from Just The News:
There is widespread evidence released by the Judiciary Committee and the DOJ inspector general contradicting the February 2018 FBI briefing memo including that the primary sub-source:
- told the FBI that he “has no idea” where some of the language attributed to him came from or that his contacts and “never mentioned” some information attributed to him.
- told the FBI he “did not know the origins” or “did not recall” other information contained in the dossier that was supposedly from his contacts
- alleged that Steele used “incorrect source characterization” for one of his contacts. told the FBI that the corroboration for the dossier was “zero” and that he takes what the sources for the dossier told him with “a grain of salt.”
- claimed much of what he told Steele was second-hand or even in jest and never intended it to be treated as intelligence because if was “word of mouth and hearsay” and “conversation that [he] had with friends over beers.”