When Trump-Russia wiretap was ‘dry hole,’ FBI wouldn’t stop digging
Byron York
WHEN TRUMP-RUSSIA WIRETAP WAS ‘DRY HOLE,’ FBI WOULDN’T STOP DIGGING. There’s an incredible amount of information in special counsel John Durham’s new 306-page report on the disastrous misdeeds and mistakes committed by the FBI and other government agencies in the Trump-Russia investigation. Here is one of many fascinating episodes.
People who follow the investigation are familiar with the case of Carter Page, who in 2016 was a short-term, low-level foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Page, who was trying to make it in the energy business, had had contacts with Russians before — he had actually helped U.S. agents investigate some Russian spies. In 2016, when Page was associated with the Trump campaign, some high-level FBI officials suspected Page was involved in a collusion plot between Russia and the Trump campaign.
That was completely wrong, and the FBI should have known it for at least two reasons. First, the bulk of the so-called incriminating information it had on Page came from the Steele dossier. That, you will recall, was a work of political opposition research from former British spy Christopher Steele, who, in the pay of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, put together a collection of salacious untruths about a “well-developed conspiracy” between Trump and Russia. In Steele’s conspiracy fantasies, Page was a super-duper mastermind, which was unusual because people who knew Page would not describe him as a super-duper mastermind.
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Second, Durham reported that top agents at the FBI’s New York field office were skeptical of the Steele portrait of Page. Remarkably, the Washington-based agents who were running the Crossfire Hurricane investigation never got in touch with the New York agents who had investigated Page in the past. If they had, they would have learned that the New York office never considered Page serious enough to wiretap, as the Crossfire Hurricane agents infamously did. Both the New York agent who ran the old Page investigation as well as other agents “were never overly concerned about Page being an intelligence officer for the Russians,” Durham reported. “At no time during the course of her investigation did [the New York agent] consider pursuing a [surveillance warrant] on Page. … In retrospect, [the agent] viewed the Page investigation as a ‘waste of money.'”
Nevertheless, senior FBI officials committed one of the worst misdeeds of the Trump-Russia investigation in an effort to get Page. They presented a case, based in part on phony information from the dossier, to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The FISA Court approved a warrant to wiretap Page, which allowed agents to hear and read not only Page’s communications but those of Trump figures who were in contact with him. The FBI wiretaps a lot of foreign figures, but there are strict procedures required before a court can give agents permission to wiretap an American. The FBI clearly abused those procedures in the case of Page. In fact, it abused the process repeatedly, first winning a 90-day warrant to wiretap Page and then going back to the court to renew the warrant for three more 90-day periods.
The public has known about that for a while. But what has received less discussion was the question of what the FBI learned from wiretapping Carter Page for a year. Obviously, Page was never charged with any crime. He was not involved in a “well-developed conspiracy” between the Trump campaign and Russia. But did the FBI learn anything from its 12-month violation of Page’s rights?
The Durham report does not devote much space to the answer, but it is clearly no. For example, there is this sentence, which avoids naming specific FBI officials: “Based on their review of the case file and the lack of evidence obtained from the FISA surveillance, neither Supervisory Special Agent-3 nor his investigators believed that Page was a threat to national security or a witting agent of the Russian government. … Special Agent-1 went as far as to say that the surveillance on Page was a ‘dry hole.'”
A dry hole. That is pretty descriptive. So not only did the FBI abuse the wiretap process — and being wrongly wiretapped by the government is a pretty fundamental violation of an American’s rights — the investigators did not get any hot information from doing so.
What is remarkable is that the FBI knew the Page wiretap was a dry hole early on yet continued to seek renewals of the warrant to keep wiretapping Page. Nobody at the operational level seemed to know why. They thought that the FBI higher-ups must have some really fantastic information and were making decisions based on that. “Special Agent-1 ‘assumed’ that ‘somebody above them’ possessed important information — unknown to the investigators — that guided Crossfire Hurricane decision-making,” the Durham report said. Indeed, when one of the investigators informed his superiors that the Page wiretap had not yielded anything, “he was largely ignored and directed to continue the FISA renewal process,” according to Durham.
From the report:
Supervisory Special Agent-2 signed all three renewals of the Page FSA application. When interviewed by the [Durham] office, Supervisor Special Agent-2 stated that, after the initial FISA surveillance of Page, the investigators had ‘low confidence’ that Page was a witting agent of the Russian government. In fact, at the time of the third renewal, Supervisor Special Agent-2 stated that the probability of Page being a witting agent was ‘very low.’ Nevertheless, Supervisor Special Agent-2 signed the final renewal because, in his opinion, it was incumbent on the FBI to exhaust all resources to ensure that Page was not a Russian intelligence officer. … For his part, Supervisory Special Agent-3 told us that he would not have signed the renewal affidavits if he had been the agent responsible for certifying the accuracy of the government’s assertions.
The Page wiretap episode was representative of the Trump-Russia investigation as a whole. Despite all the headlines, despite all the crazy talk on cable TV, and despite the BS from Steele, investigators knew pretty early on, certainly in 2017, that they could not establish that collusion took place. Yet they kept pushing.
Durham sees a dangerous process at work. The FBI turned the normal standards of investigation upside down. It knew it could not prove Page was a Russian agent, so it continued its work in an effort to prove Page was not a Russian agent. “A U.S. person is an agent of a foreign power if there is probable cause to believe that the person is knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of a foreign power, or knowingly helping another person in such activities,” Durham wrote. “That is an affirmative determination. FISA surveillance must be used for the purposes and in the ways specified in the statute rather than to prove that someone is not an agent of a foreign power.” It was an abuse of the government’s power to keep wiretapping Page to somehow prove he was not something.
That approach mirrored the fevered public debate going on over Trump and Russia from 2017 to 2019. For example, when it was becoming clear that there was not enough evidence to even begin to prove the dossier’s truthfulness, many Democrats, media talking heads, and Never Trumpers began to argue that the dossier was nevertheless legitimate because it had not been proven untrue. Such thinking had catastrophic effects on political debate in those years, effects that are still being felt today.
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