Congressional investigators know that Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the Trump dossier on behalf of the Clinton campaign, kept supplying allegations to the FBI after the 2016 election — and even after he was terminated as a source by the bureau for giving confidential information to the media.
Because he had broken his agreement with the FBI, bureau procedure did not allow agents to keep using Steele as a source. But they did so anyway — by devising a system in which Steele spoke regularly with Bruce Ohr, a top Obama Justice Department official whose wife worked for Fusion GPS, which hired Steele to search for dirt on Donald Trump in Russia. Ohr then passed on Steele’s information to the FBI.
In a highly unusual arrangement, Ohr, who was the fourth-highest ranking official in the Justice Department, acted as an intermediary for a terminated source for the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe. His task was to deliver to the FBI what Steele told him, which effectively meant the bureau kept Steele as a source.
Agents made a record of each time Ohr gave the bureau information from Steele. Those records are in the form of so-called 302 reports, in which the FBI agents write up notes of interviews during an investigation.
There are a dozen 302 reports on FBI post-election interviews of Ohr. The first was Nov. 22, 2016. After that, the FBI interviewed Ohr on Dec. 5; Dec. 12; Dec. 20; Jan. 23, 2017; Jan. 25; Jan. 27; Feb. 6; Feb. 14; May 8; May 12; and May 15. The dates, previously unreported publicly, were included in a July letter from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, to the FBI and Justice Department.
Congressional investigators have read the Ohr-Steele 302s. But the FBI has kept them under tight control, insisting they remain classified and limiting access to a few lawmakers and staff. Congress is not allowed to physically possess copies of any of the documents.
Now, Grassley says there is “no continuing justification for the FBI to keep the documents secret.” Grassley, who exercises oversight authority over the FBI, is formally challenging the bureau’s decision to keep the Ohr-Steele 302s under wraps. Grassley’s insistence has been met, unsurprisingly, with no cooperation from the FBI.
One small bit of the Ohr 302s has already been made public. The House Intelligence Committee, in its memo focusing on the FBI’s application to the secret FISA court to win a warrant to wiretap onetime Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page, included a 16-word passage from an Ohr 302 in which Ohr described Christopher Steele’s motivation to stop candidate Trump. (Even though Ohr’s interviews with the FBI took place after the election, he apparently described things Steele told him during their contacts in the months before the election, as well as new information.) Here is the relevant portion of the House memo:
After the release of the House memo, Sen. Grassley, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., wrote to the FBI noting the existence of “numerous FD-302s demonstrating that Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr continued to pass along allegations from Mr. Steele to the FBI after the FBI suspended its formal relationship with Mr. Steele for unauthorized contact with the media, and demonstrating that Mr. Ohr otherwise funneled allegations from Fusion GPS and Mr. Steele to the FBI.”
Grassley also noted other documents of interest: In addition to the 302s, written by the FBI agents who interviewed Ohr, Ohr himself also made notes of his talks with Steele. Those notes, which were never classified, have apparently been given to Congress; in his letter, Grassley referred to “63 pages of unclassified emails and notes documenting Mr. Ohr’s interactions with Mr. Steele.”
Grassley’s argument for declassification of the Ohr-Steele 302s is that the existence of the documents is widely known. Also, some of the material in them has been included in congressional documents and reported in the press. And Ohr’s own notes of the meetings, in the possession of Congress, are not classified. So now, there is no reason for the 302s to remain classified and for the FBI to withhold copies from Congress. The ultimate goal, given Grassley’s statement that there is no reason for the FBI to “keep the documents secret,” is for the public to see them.
What would all of that show? It’s likely that the 302s and notes, if released, would show that the FBI was both still trying to get new information out of Steele after the election and that it was also trying to verify the information Steele had already provided in the dossier installments he handed over in preceding months. Remember, the FBI had already presented some of the dossier’s allegations as evidence to the FISA court. After going out on a limb like that, the bureau wanted to know if the allegations were true or not.
In a larger sense, the Ohr-Steele 302s could shed some light on how an effort — it certainly included Steele, but also others — to keep Trump from being elected morphed into an effort to keep Trump from being inaugurated and then morphed into an effort to remove Trump from office. A version of that effort is still going on, of course, even as some in Congress try to find out how it started.
