[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 199 (Thursday, December 12, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7017-S7019]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, the chaos in Washington, DC, precipitated 
by impeachment mania or our inability to get what should be relatively 
straightforward work done, like the appropriations process and all the 
gymnastics over the USMCA, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement--in 
fact, we are coming down to a deadline on Friday, the 20th of December, 
when the current continuing resolution runs out.
  Because of everything that is going on, many people may not have been 
able to pay that much attention--and I think attention is deserved--to 
the testimony of Department of Justice Inspector General Michael 
Horowitz, who testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee 
yesterday. I know there was some news coverage of it, but I wanted to 
give some reflections on the testimony Mr. Horowitz gave.
  First of all, the Office of Inspector General is a very important 
one. They are a watchdog to make sure the laws Congress passes and the 
rules of the various agencies--in this case, the Department of 
Justice--are complied with. It is really very, very important.
  With everything else going on, it is important to have an impartial 
inspector general to conduct that kind of investigation and to hold 
people accountable--something that doesn't happen enough here in 
Washington, DC.
  Inspector General Horowitz, along with his team, was widely praised 
for producing an outstanding report this time on the 
counterintelligence investigation of the Trump administration by the 
Obama-era Justice Department and the FBI.
  This is a 480-page report. I have a copy of it right here. It is 
redacted for public release. If you look at it online--you can look at 
it through the Department of Justice website--you can see that some of 
it is redacted or black marks are drawn through parts of it to protect 
certain classified information.
  But there is more than enough information contained in this report to 
know that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump 
administration by the Obama Justice Department, including Comey and the 
FBI, was an unmitigated disaster.
  Mr. Horowitz highlighted some of the truly disturbing and alarming 
facts about how this Russia investigation was conducted--how it was 
initiated and how it was conducted. There were mistakes made, including 
some intentional misconduct, which has now been referred to the Justice 
Department for potential investigation and even charging and 
prosecution. This was a troubling report, identifying at least 17 
different areas of concern.
  The report is full of legal jargon, government acronyms, and a long 
list of names most Americans probably don't recognize. The bottom line 
is, beneath all of this is a pattern of concerning behavior that ought 
to concern everyone who cares about civil liberties.
  At the core of these issues is, under Director Comey, the FBI's abuse 
of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. I know people 
have heard the reference to FISA, and that is short for Foreign 
Intelligence Surveillance Act. In other words, when our intelligence 
services, including the FBI, gather information, they can't do that on 
American citizens absent a showing of probable cause in front of a 
court. That is a protection of our civil liberties. When it comes to 
foreign intelligence, there is a different court--the Foreign 
Intelligence Surveillance Court--that has to assess and judge whether 
they have met the appropriate legal standards.

  The inspector general found that the Comey FBI failed to file 
accurate applications to surveil an American citizen by the name of 
Carter Page.
  There are very exacting requirements, very technical but very 
important requirements that the FBI has to put together, in 
consultation with the National Security Division at the Department of 
Justice, in order to go to court--the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance 
Court--and justify issuance of the authority to gather intelligence on 
an individual.
  In this case, they claimed that Carter Page, who was for a time 
associated with the Trump campaign--they claim that they suspected him 
to be an agent of a foreign power--in other words, Russia.
  The way these documents were prepared and the way in which this 
matter was pursued was hardly a stellar performance by the Comey FBI, 
and I will mention that here in a moment. Once that FISA warrant is 
issued, as it was on an American citizen--Carter Page--that 
individual's private communications then come into the hands of the FBI 
as part of their investigation of a potential agent of a foreign power.
  As I said yesterday and reiterated to Inspector General Horowitz this 
morning--or yesterday morning--spying on an American citizen is not 
something to be taken lightly. None of us should view this as a trivial 
matter. That is why there are such strong protections in place to 
prevent an abuse of power.
  One of those backstops is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance 
Court--a specialized court appointed by Chief Justice Roberts, Chief 
Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, that sits in 
rotation for a time to look at the government's applications for these 
warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. You can 
imagine that when that court makes important decisions involving the 
national security of the United States or the civil liberties of an 
American citizen, they need to have a full picture. They need to have 
the utmost candor exercised by the FBI of all the details and 
information surrounding the issue at hand. Again, this is no trivial 
matter. The court is determining whether the government has a 
compelling case to secretly spy on an American's communications.
  Unfortunately, as we heard from Mr. Horowitz, the FBI, under Director 
Comey, fell dramatically short of that goal. The application for 
something as serious as a foreign intelligence surveillance warrant 
should be free from error, let alone intentional lies. Unfortunately, 
Inspector Horowitz found 17 different instances where the FBI agents 
involved in securing this FISA warrant failed that standard.
  First of all, the inspector general identified 7 mistakes in the 
original application and an additional 10 in 3 renewals, for a total of 
4 separate warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. 
These applications weren't put together and examined by rank-and-file 
agents; these errors came from three handpicked teams that didn't raise 
any red flags for high-level

[[Page S7018]]

senior officials--something that Mr. Horowitz said made him deeply 
concerned, which is a feeling I share.
  One of the most glaring errors was the applications' reliance on a 
deeply flawed private intelligence report--opposition research paid for 
by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee--on 
Donald Trump. This is called the Steele dossier, as people have heard 
that reference. Mr. Steele is a former intelligence officer who worked 
for the British Government, the British intelligence services, but he 
had long since retired from his government service, and now he was out 
for hire to dig up information--in this case, on a political candidate 
in the Presidential election in 2016.
  One of the biggest concerns we have all had since the 2016 election 
is Russian interference in our elections. Sometimes this is called 
active measures, where they merely try to sow discord and dissent by 
social media use, by propaganda, and by intelligence services leaking 
information.
  I asked Attorney General Barr, before the Judiciary Committee earlier 
this year, whether he could state with confidence that the Steele 
Dossier, which we know was paid for by the Democratic National 
Committee and the Clinton administration, was not a part of this 
Russian disinformation campaign, whether he could say it was not. The 
Attorney General said no, he could not.
  FBI attorneys assisting in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation 
called it a ``close call'' on whether they had sufficient justification 
to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue a warrant 
so they could collect intelligence on an American citizen, Carter Page. 
What made that a close call? What turned a close call into the granting 
of that authority? Well, it was the Steele dossier. It was a hit piece, 
really--called that by one of our intelligence agencies--based on 
internet rumor, not based on verified information. That was used by the 
Crossfire Hurricane team to apply to the Foreign Intelligence 
Surveillance Court to get a warrant issued to surveil and spy on an 
American citizen.
  Although I know that taking a look at the real source of the Steele 
dossier was outside the realm of the inspector general's duties, it is 
worth investigating because it played a central and essential role in 
the FBI's FISA applications. That is what Mr. Horowitz found.

  Mr. Horowitz found on one occasion serious and intentional misconduct 
on the part of an FBI lawyer, and he now has referred that lawyer for 
criminal prosecution. But the explanations they offered for the other 
errors were completely unsatisfactory, and they should not be 
overlooked or excused. Attorney General Barr echoed that in a TV 
interview earlier this week. I trust him and Mr. Durham to get to the 
bottom of it. They have more authority than the inspector general to 
compel the production of evidence in testimony--much like a grand jury, 
as opposed to what the inspector general had, which was basically a 
voluntary willingness of witnesses to come forward and to look at the 
FBI's internal files.
  To make matters worse, even as new and exculpatory information--
information that tended to show innocence--came to light on Carter 
Page, this information was not reflected in what the FBI filed when 
they requested a foreign intelligence surveillance warrant from the 
court.
  You have to wonder--if this level of mishandling is occurring in a 
high-profile investigation of a Presidential candidate, someone who 
would later become the leader of the free world, what kind of 
protections are in place for average American citizens?
  We place an enormous amount of trust in the U.S. Government to keep 
us safe and also to respect and uphold our constitutional rights. So 
seeing these types of errors, intentional and unintentional, slipping 
through the cracks in such a sensitive investigation doesn't give me 
much confidence that it is not happening in other cases.
  Another question I asked the inspector general was on something 
called defensive counterintelligence briefings. This is a little bit 
arcane, but let me explain.
  There are two different types of investigations by the FBI. One is of 
a potential criminal prosecution. We are all familiar with that. But 
the second role that the FBI plays is conducting counterintelligence 
investigations--in other words, protecting the American people and our 
national security from the attempts by foreign actors, malign foreign 
actors to gain intelligence on the U.S. Government and the American 
people, to our detriment and to the detriment of our national security.
  One of the things Loretta Lynch, who was Attorney General under 
Barack Obama, said is that in a counterintelligence investigation, 
defensive briefings are routine. In other words, if the Presiding 
Officer were a target of a Russian intelligence operation--somebody had 
bumped into you at the grocery store or shown up at your kid's soccer 
game or perhaps shown up at your work, and you began to wonder, who 
this person and why have they taken such interest in me?--well, if the 
FBI discovers information that indicates this is part of an effort to 
recruit an American citizen to become an asset for the Russian 
intelligence services, what the FBI is obligated to do is to give a 
defensive briefing where they might tell the Presiding Officer or me or 
anybody else who might be targeted ``This is what is happening to you, 
so be on your guard. Don't think this is innocent. Protect yourself,'' 
and in so doing, protect the national security of the United States.
  These briefings, we learned from Loretta Lynch, are routine. They are 
given routinely to political candidates, to individuals, and to 
companies that hear from the FBI about those potential threats so they 
can take steps to protect themselves.
  We know that both Presidential candidates of 2016--Donald Trump and 
Hillary Clinton--received some kind of defensive briefing in August of 
2016, but the so-called defensive briefing for the Trump campaign was 
unique in a number of aspects.
  At the time the FBI believed the Russians were trying to infiltrate 
the Trump campaign, you would think that would have been a prime 
opportunity to share that information with Candidate Trump and his 
campaign so he could tell the people on his campaign: Be on your guard, 
and don't engage in any unnecessary contact with people whom you don't 
know and who might have malign motives.
  The FBI could have advised the Trump campaign about these potential 
threats and given them their professional advice on how to mitigate the 
concerns, but that didn't happen in the case of the Trump campaign. 
Instead of warning the Trump campaign about possible Russian efforts, 
they actually inserted--the FBI inserted a case agent into the briefing 
and used that as an opportunity to collect information in support of 
their own criminal investigation of GEN Michael Flynn.
  It is not only unfair to insert an FBI agent into an otherwise benign 
setting in order to collect information on an American citizen in a 
criminal investigation, obviously General Flynn did not know the FBI 
was trying to do this under a pretext, so he couldn't say: I would like 
to talk to a lawyer. I would like to know that what I say can't be used 
against me in a court of law. In other words, all of the normal 
protections under the Bill of Rights that would be given to somebody 
under a criminal investigation were not afforded because of this 
pretextual defensive briefing where the FBI agent slipped in in order 
to collect information.
  Here is the bottom line: This defensive briefing of the Trump 
campaign lasted a whopping 13 minutes--hardly enough time to convey the 
sort of information you would want to a political campaign. I can tell 
you that if the FBI came to me and told me that some foreign actor was 
trying to infiltrate my campaign, I would want to know about it, and I 
would want to tell the people who volunteered in the campaign to knock 
it off. But President Trump, when he was a candidate, was not given 
that information or the opportunity to shut it down, which he should 
have been.
  Director Wray, to his credit, after hearing about that, has accepted 
the recommendations of the inspector general and has moved quickly to 
try to rectify some of these practices, and he has already issued 
corrective action on them. This doesn't negate the fact that the 
American people's trust in their government to protect them has been 
harmed by the Comey FBI.

[[Page S7019]]

  We need the American people's confidence in the laws the Congress 
passes, the constitutional rights they enjoy under our Constitution, 
and the oversight that Congress performs and that the FBI and the 
intelligence community are going to be required to play by the rules of 
the road and not jeopardize the civil liberties of any American, much 
less a candidate for the U.S. Presidency. This is something I will talk 
about more at another time.
  Chairman Graham of the Judiciary Committee assures me that 
yesterday's very important hearing, at which Inspector Horowitz 
testified, will not be the last hearing on this matter but merely the 
first. There is more to come, as there well should be.
  I yield floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.

                          ____________________