What Did Comey Know And When Did He Know It?

On March 20, 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress that the FBI was formally investigating whether there were contacts between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. We later learned that the alleged basis for this investigation was the Steele Dossier. Since then, we’ve also learned that the information in the Steele Dossier was fake.

The answer, based upon newly released documents from the Senate Judiciary Committee, is that by mid-February 2017 Comey knew or should have known that the Steele Dossier was a hoax perpetrated by the Hillary campaign.

To go back a step, we know from Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December 2019 report that the FBI relied upon the Steele Dossier both to spy on Carter Page and to investigate the Trump campaign. The same report establishes that the FBI’s investigation revealed that Steele’s information came from a source who, in turn, got his information from yet another source. By March 20, when Comey announced that the FBI was looking into the Trump campaign, FBI agents on the ground had already stated that the primary source had no credibility.

What the Horowitz Report did not address was when Comey personally learned about the credibility problem. Comey refused to cooperate with the IG investigation, so Horowitz glossed over Comey’s knowledge or lack thereof. One of the problems (see pp. 370-371 of the report) was that the FBI agents who interviewed the sub-source wrote documents falsely implying that he was reliable, even as their notes said otherwise.

That confusion held Horowitz back from imputing knowledge to Comey. The two newly declassified documents, however, practically cry out that, when Comey announced the Trump investigation, he knew or should have known that it had no basis.

The first document, which is heavily redacted, establishes that the primary source was not (as many speculated) a highly placed Russian. Contacts with the Kremlin would have militated in favor of believing him or her. But when the FBI identified Steele’s primary source, they found that he was not a Russian official, nor was he even based in Russia. That should have been a huge red flag that there was a problem.

The second document poses an even bigger problem for Comey. On February 14, 2017, the New York Times published an article entitled, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contact With Russian Intelligence.” Peter Strzok, who headed the Trump investigation (aka Operation Crossfire Hurricane), read the article and made notes establishing that the FBI had no basis for investigating Trump. Sharyl Attkisson

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