Republicans Claim Surveillance Power Abuses in Russia Inquiry

WASHINGTON — A fall 2016 application for a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant targeting a former Trump campaign adviser has become the latest front in the partisan struggle over the investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election.

Republican aides on the House Intelligence Committee have prepared a memorandum that is said to accuse law enforcement officials of improperly obtaining the warrant. House Republicans are calling for the declassification and release of the report, while Democrats say that it is full of misinformation and is a political stunt.

People familiar with the report said its main allegation was that law enforcement officials failed to adequately explain to the intelligence court judge that they were relying in part on research by an investigator, Christopher Steele, that had been financed by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. That, the report is said to claim, suggests that the judge was misled.

The rollout of the memorandum was sudden and intense. Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee abruptly moved to make the report available to the entire House at a closed-door meeting Thursday, surprising Democrats who did not know it had been prepared, according to a participant.

After a party-line vote to make it available, Republicans began declaring that the report draped the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation in scandal.

“I have read the memo,” Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, wrote on Twitter. “The sickening reality has set in. I no longer hold out hope there is an innocent explanation for the information the public has seen.”

But Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the committee, denounced the report as “a profoundly misleading set of talking points” that were “rife with factual inaccuracies” and created “a distorted view of the FBI.” He said the memo’s boosters were carrying water for the White House.

Several people familiar with the memo said it contained several pages of bullet points focusing on material drawn from the application materials for a FISA warrant targeting Carter Page, a onetime campaign adviser to President Donald Trump. Page, who had visited Moscow in July 2016 and left the campaign that September, a month before the application, was suspected of acting as a foreign agent for the Russian government. He has denied wrongdoing.

Although the application is said to have drawn on a variety of material, the Intelligence Committee memo apparently focuses on one strand: information from Steele, a former British intelligence agent who wrote the dossier of unverified and salacious allegations that suggested that Trump had been compromised by a Russian intelligence operation.

Steele had been retained to investigate Trump by Fusion GPS, a research firm that had been hired by a law firm working for Democrats. When Steele decided to take the information he was gathering to the FBI in August and October 2016, according to people familiar with those conversations, he told the bureau’s agents only that he was working for interests opposed to Trump’s campaign. Fusion GPS, which was under contract with the Democrats at the time, paid around $160,000 for Steele’s research.

It is not clear how much of that context — if any — law enforcement officials conveyed to the court.

Two people familiar with the warrant application said law enforcement officials described Steele not as a Democratic-funded investigator, but as a reliable FBI source who had previously provided information about corruption in FIFA, the global governing body for soccer.

Stephen Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor who specializes in national security issues, said that disclosing Steele’s backers could affect a judge’s assessment of his credibility. But Vladeck cautioned that without seeing the warrant application, it was impossible to say whether that information was just “background noise” or pivotal.

“There is a world of difference between an application that relied solely on this information and an application that relied on this and 22 pieces of independently corroborated information,” he said.

In a transcript of a congressional interview made public Thursday, Glenn R. Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, told the House Intelligence Committee that Steele decided on his own to go to the FBI and that neither of them had asked permission from their client, nor received instructions from their client to do so.

Republicans have been suggesting for weeks that the Russia investigation traces back to a conspiracy by top FBI officials to sabotage Trump. They have noted that two officials who were involved in the Russia investigation — Peter Strzok, who led the FBI counterespionage section in 2016, and Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer — exchanged texts indicating that they disliked Trump and wanted him to lose the election.

A senior Democratic staff member on the House Intelligence Committee said the memo drew on classified documents that have been shown only to Rep. Devin Nunes, Schiff and four staff members. “It’s like they put out a book review of a book they never read,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., who serves on the committee.

Seeded throughout the memo, Democrats said, were characterizations of law enforcement officials as nefariously biased in favor of Clinton’s campaign. Swalwell said he feared it would cause lasting damage to the FBI’s reputation, adding, “It is clear to me that they are just trying to put a cloud over Mueller,” referring to Robert Mueller, the special counsel. Nunes has previously advanced alarming claims about the Russia investigation and surveillance in support of Trump. Last spring, he said he planned to share information with the White House showing that Trump’s associates had been picked up in surveillance and that Obama administration officials had improperly “unmasked” their identities in intelligence reports.

It later emerged that Nunes had received the information he saw from the White House itself, and other Republicans who viewed the material concluded that there had not been any improper unmasking.

In a speech on the House floor Thursday night, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., blamed the Steele dossier for creating a false Russian narrative. He said Nunes had been working to get the truth and he was “shocked to read exactly what has taken place.”

Conservative news media like the Fox News evening shows pounced after reports of the memo’s existence emerged Thursday, with personalities like Sean Hannity declaring that what he had been told about the memo showed that Mueller’s investigation into the Trump-Russia affair should be disbanded.

The Twitter account for WikiLeaks offered to pay anyone who would leak the memo, using the hashtag #releasethememo, which by Friday morning had been invoked and amplified thousands of times in posts by other Twitter accounts that are deemed by a German Marshall Fund tracking project to be part of Russian-linked influence networks.