Republican senators to raise charges against man behind Trump dossier

More than a year after Republican leaders promised to investigate Russian interference in the presidential election, two influential Republicans on Friday made the first known congressional criminal referral in connection with the meddling — against one of the people who sought to expose it.

Senator Charles E Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a senior committee member, told the Justice Department that they had reason to believe that a former British spy, Christopher Steele, lied to federal authorities about his contacts with reporters regarding information in a dossier, and they urged the department to investigate. The committee is running one of three congressional investigations into Russian election meddling, and its inquiry has come to focus on, in part, Steele’s explosive dossier that purported to detail Russia’s interference and the Trump campaign’s complicity.

The decision by Grassley and Graham to single out the former intelligence officer behind the dossier infuriated Democrats and raised the stakes in the growing partisan battle over the investigations into Trump, his campaign team and Russia.

The Senate Judiciary Committee effort played into a far broader campaign waged by conservatives to cast doubt on the Trump-Russia investigations, and instead turn the veracity of the dossier and the credibility of its promulgators into the central issue. At the same time, President Trump and his allies have demanded that the Justice Department reopen its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server and the Clinton Foundation. FBI agents have begun interviewing people connected to the foundation about whether any donations were made in exchange for political favors while Clinton was secretary of state.

Beyond the Senate Judiciary Committee, Representative Devin Nunes of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has also been pressing to train focus of its Russia investigation on the dossier. This week, he appeared to finally secure access to FBI documents and witnesses that he views as crucial to unraveling what the bureau did with the dossier. And he has aggressively pursued Fusion GPS, the research firm that hired Steele — the committee, for instance, has issued only a single subpoena in its investigation for bank records, those of Fusion GPS.

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More than a year ago, Republican leaders in Congress agreed that committees in the House and Senate would investigate Russia’s efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Graham declared in December 2016, “The first thing we want to establish is, ‘Did the Russians hack into our political system?’ Then you work outward from there.”

Since then, that spirit of bipartisanship has frayed. At this point, only the Senate Intelligence Committee appears to be pursuing an investigation with bipartisan support. But Grassley said he did only what he had to.

“I don’t take lightly making a referral for criminal investigation,” he said. “But, as I would with any credible evidence of a crime unearthed in the course of our investigations, I feel obliged to pass that information along to the Justice Department for appropriate review.”

Democrats were furious.

“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,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, who added that she had not been consulted about the referral.

The criminal referral makes no assessment of the veracity of the dossier’s contents, much of which remains unsubstantiated nearly a year after it became public.

But the dossier has emerged as Exhibit A in Republicans’ insistence that Obama-era political bias could have affected the FBI’s decision to open a counterintelligence investigation in July 2016 into whether Trump’s associates aided the Russian election interference.

Republicans, including the two senators, have argued that the dossier is tantamount to political opposition research, and claimed that it might have been used by the FBI to open its investigation. They have also said it might have provided the basis for key investigative actions, including a secret court-approved wiretap of a Trump campaign aide.

© 2018 The New York Times News Service