[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 197 (Tuesday, December 10, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6937-S6939]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Russia Investigation

  Mr. President, on top of all of this, the Justice Department 
Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, yesterday released his report on 
the counterintelligence investigation of the Trumbull campaign and any 
potential contacts with Russia.
  We know Director Mueller, Special Counsel, has concluded after about 
2 years that there was no collusion, no obstruction, but this was an 
investigation of something called Crossfire Hurricane, which is a 
counterintelligence investigation by the FBI that ultimately led to the 
appointment of the special counsel.
  I want to talk a little bit in advance of Inspector Horowitz's 
appearance before the Judiciary Committee tomorrow because it is very, 
very important. We may recall that this process started about a year 
and a half ago after speculation over the motivation and the methods of 
the FBI in opening up an investigation on President Trump when he was 
still Candidate Trump. The 2016 election was historic in many ways, but 
one of the ways in which it was historic in not a positive way was the 
fact that both Presidential candidates were under active FBI 
investigations leading up to the election--Hillary Clinton, for her use 
of a private email server.
  We saw the press conference held by Director Comey on July 5, I 
believe it was, only to reopen the investigation publicly days before 
the election. You can imagine how Secretary Clinton felt about Director 
Comey's actions and what potential influence it had on the outcome of 
the election, but now, depending on which TV channel you watch or what 
sort of social media feed that you subscribe to, there are vastly 
different narratives about what this inspector general report that 
spans 400-plus pages does or does not prove. But when you take away all 
the spin, there are some key findings in this report that should be of 
grave concern to every American--Republicans, Democrats, unaffiliated. 
If you are an American citizen and you care about civil liberties, you 
should care about what is in this report.
  First of all, there are errors and inaccuracies in something called a 
foreign intelligence surveillance warrant. People may not realize it, 
but the intelligence community cannot open up an investigation on an 
American citizen unless they get a warrant issued by a judge upon the 
showing of probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed.
  Now, the law is different when it comes to non-citizens overseas, and 
that is what the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act purports to 
cover, the procedures and the protocol and the oversight of that very 
delicate yet very important process.
  One of the things that gives me assurance that our intelligence 
community is operating within its guidelines and the law is the 
oversight that Congress provides on a regular basis. It is the laws we 
pass, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It is the work 
being done by the committees, the Select Committee on Intelligence.
  I see Senator Wyden from Oregon who serves and served with 
distinction on that committee for a long time, but those intelligence 
committees, both in the House and the Senate, provide essential 
oversight of our intelligence agencies to make sure they stay within 
the hashmarks, to stay within the guardrails that Congress prescribes 
under the law.
  Then there are the internal rules used at the FBI, the National 
Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, that they have to 
comply with, their own internal guidelines derived from the authorities 
Congress provides. Then there is a very important court called the 
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. When the FBI believes they 
have to open an investigation into a potential intelligence matter, 
they can apply for a foreign intelligence surveillance warrant, which 
opens up authorities they can use to gather intelligence to investigate 
this threat to national security of the United States, but it is a very 
laborious and detailed process.
  They have to apply to the court, and the court relies on the 
representations made in that application. That is why you have heard so 
much discussion in recent months and even years about the foreign 
intelligence surveillance application issued on some of the people 
affiliated with the Trump campaign, including a man named Carter Page. 
These documents are submitted to a Federal court to determine whether 
the government should have access to what would otherwise be private 
communications.
  In this instance, the question was: Was there any indication Mr. Page 
was

[[Page S6938]]

an agent of a foreign power and improperly using his relationship with 
the Russian Government and the Russian intelligence services to become 
a threat to the national security of the United States?
  I would think we would all agree, as a fundamental matter, that 
spying on an American citizen is no small thing, but that is what we 
are talking about here. There are strong and exhaustive processes in 
place to prevent the government from abusing the powers provided under 
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and that supports where the 
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court comes into play.

  This court, like most courts, relies on the honesty and the accuracy 
and the completeness of the information provided to do its job 
properly, but we know in the case of the Carter Page application, there 
were a multitude of errors. In fact, the inspector general has 
identified 17 errors in the four different applications for a warrant 
under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
  One of them jumps out at me because it involves a lawyer in the 
general counsel's office at the FBI altering a government record and 
intentionally deceiving the FISA court about Carter Page's involvement 
with the intelligence community--in this case another member of the 
intelligence community, a Federal agency. But this lawyer with the FBI 
Office of General Counsel intentionally altered that record so that, in 
the application for the FISA warrant, the FBI would literally be 
relying and deceiving the FISA court about the facts. That is a grave 
and serious and profound problem.
  We know there are a number of other errors. That is hardly an error. 
That is an intentional act for which I understand the gentleman who 
made that doctored email has now been referred for a criminal 
investigation and perhaps prosecution for intentionally violating the 
FBI's policy and providing a deceptive piece of information to the FISA 
court.
  Willingly, I know Mr. Horowitz is going to be asked about political 
bias, and he says there is no documentary or testamentary indication of 
political bias, but I think what this report demonstrates is something 
a lot more serious than political bias. It demonstrates an abuse of 
power that ought to concern every American citizen because, if these 
rogue agents at the FBI--primarily the leadership of the FBI--can do 
this to a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, or the President of the 
United States, they can do it to any one of us. What sort of power 
would we have if the might of the Federal Government was concentrated 
in a raid against us in this sort of investigation? That is why we must 
take these sorts of failures and intentional deceptions very, very 
seriously.
  Well, to make matters worse, we know this application relied on the 
deeply flawed Steele dossier. Well, the Steele dossier was a piece of 
opposition research produced by the Hillary Clinton campaign against 
Donald Trump. What they did is they hired a former intelligence agent 
from the United Kingdom, Mr. Steele, to generate what has now been 
called a dossier. I want to remind my colleagues that, when Attorney 
General Barr testified before the Judiciary Committee earlier this 
year, I asked him if he could state with confidence that the Steele 
dossier was not a part of a Russian disinformation campaign, and the 
Attorney General said, no, he could not make that statement with 
confidence.
  He told the committee that this is one of the areas he was reviewing 
as part of his investigation, but he said, ``I don't think it's 
entirely speculative.''
  The inspector general touched on this in his report but noted that an 
investigation of this dossier falls outside the scope of the inspector 
general's oversight role. His job is primarily to do oversight of the 
FBI and the Department of Justice and not to investigate these outside 
matters. But we need to know with confidence whether this Steele 
dossier was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. We are all 
profoundly concerned about foreign countries becoming involved in our 
elections, and there was no more intrusive means of getting involved in 
the 2016 election than the generation of this dossier. We need to know 
its providence. We need to know whether this was planted by our 
adversaries in order to create distension and discord, which has been 
obviously the result of this investigation for the last 3 years. So I 
hope Attorney General Barr or U.S. Attorney John Durham will be able to 
provide clarity on this topic.
  This is especially important considering we learned from this 400-
page-plus report that the dossier played a central and essential role 
in the FISA process. As time went on, a new and even exculpatory or 
innocent information was discovered. We know that the information 
provided by the FBI in these renewal applications for this FISA warrant 
were not correct.
  Well, the inspector general failed to resolve whether the FISA was 
improperly issued, but the report suggested the FISA board is 
considering this question, as well it should. I have never sat on a 
FISA court, but I have spent 13 years as a State court judge. When you 
lie to a judge, that judge takes it seriously, and they have contempt 
powers and other recourse when that happens. So it is essential that 
the FISA court weigh in.
  Let me say once again, no American should be subjected to this kind 
of abuse of power by their own government. That is why we need to 
restore the public confidence in the FBI. I believe Director Chris Wray 
has begun that process and make sure that these types of egregious 
errors and intentional acts do not become the norm.
  Director Wray sent a letter to the Department of Justice's Office of 
Inspector General, detailing actions his agency will take to strengthen 
the FISA processes and make these documents less susceptible to errors 
or intentional alterations. I appreciate the Director's acknowledgement 
of these problems under the agency's previous leadership and his 
commitment to preventing similar errors and alterations.
  That brings me to another concern. This has to do with something 
called the defensive briefings. This is something that Loretta Lynch, 
the former Attorney General, said was routine in counterintelligence 
matters. Let me explain for a minute.
  The FBI provides many different functions. We are most familiar with 
its law enforcement investigation function. They investigate potential 
crimes and present that to the Department of Justice, which then 
decides whether to charge a person with a crime. That is one of the 
most important roles the FBI plays. But it also plays a very important 
role when it comes to counterintelligence; that is, countering the 
malign activities of foreign nations like Russia and China and the 
threats they pose to our national security.
  What Loretta Lynch told us is that these defensive briefings are 
fairly standard. It is an opportunity for the FBI to advise the target 
of these threats by a foreign influence so that they can take steps to 
protect themselves. We know that both candidates, Hillary Clinton and 
Donald Trump, received something called the defensive briefings in 
August of 2015.
  The defensive briefing for the Trump campaign lasted 13 minutes, 
according to this report. It was a check-the-box, perfunctory defensive 
briefing. I am confident the FBI did not come in to tell President 
Trump, then-Candidate Trump: The Russians are checking the doors and 
the windows, and they are trying to break into your campaign. You need 
to tell these people who are affiliated with your campaign to keep 
their eyes open and to knock off their association with these likely 
Russian intelligence officers.
  At the time, the FBI believed the Russians were infiltrating the 
Trump campaign. The FBI should have told them, but they didn't. So this 
is different from a criminal investigation, as I said.
  The FBI was presented with a couple of options when it came to 
advising the Trump campaign. One was to provide as much information as 
possible so that they could have given a real, constructive briefing 
about known threats and sufficient information to help the Trump 
campaign mitigate the threat. But that is not what the FBI did.
  Option two was to provide a generic briefing--no specifics, no names, 
no real details, just a generic warning that foreign governments are 
actively working to interfere with the election and maybe a little 
lecture about cyber hygiene and why you should change your passwords, 
maybe get dual authentication when it comes to accessing websites and 
email, and not to

[[Page S6939]]

click on those phishing emails that we all get from time to time that 
could unload a Trojan horse or some other malware onto your computer. 
But that is not what FBI did here either.
  Somehow, the FBI managed to come up with a third option, as 
documented in this report. They used this briefing not as a way to 
alert the Trump campaign of potential threats from Russian intelligence 
services; they used it as an opportunity to conduct an investigation 
against General Flynn, who worked on President Trump's campaign. They 
were even so bold as to insert one of those investigatory agents--part 
of the Crossfire Hurricane investigative team--into that briefing with 
President Trump and his campaign.
  Knowing that the FBI did that in this case, I can't imagine many 
campaigns that would want a defensive briefing because you, frankly, 
couldn't trust the intentions of these officials. Would you believe 
that they were there to share intelligence and help you protect 
American national security or conduct an investigation, unbeknownst to 
you?
  When we talk about the need to secure our elections from foreign 
interference, you can't, in the process, destroy public confidence in 
all of our institutions, including the FBI.
  I want to be clear. I am glad Director Wray addressed these defensive 
briefings yesterday, among other matters. I have confidence in Director 
Wray, and I think a new leadership in the FBI since all of this 
terrible period occurred has been encouraging.
  Director Wray has clarified what his predecessors clearly missed, 
saying: ``The FBI's role in these briefings should be for national 
security purposes and not for investigative purposes.''
  This report has left me with a number of questions and a lot of 
concerns, and I am glad we will have the opportunity to ask Inspector 
General Horowitz more about this report tomorrow in the Judiciary 
Committee.
  It is important that we get to the bottom of concerted efforts to 
deceive the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the use of 
salacious and unverified materials in order to justify the issuance of 
these very sensitive FISA warrants.
  I believe some of the actions the inspector general has identified 
undermine public confidence in our public safety and national security 
measures, and that is something we should all be willing to fight for.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.