Special Counsel Robert Mueller should resign to prevent more political turmoil over conflict of interest.
Did the bureau use disinformation to trigger
its Trump probe?
By The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
It turns out that Russia has sown distrust in
the U.S. political system—aided and abetted by the Democratic Party, and
perhaps the FBI. This is an about-face from the dominant media narrative of the
last year, and it requires a full investigation.
The Washington Post revealed Tuesday that the Hillary
Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee jointly paid for that
infamous “dossier” full of Russian disinformation against Donald Trump.
They filtered the payments through a U.S. law firm (Perkins Coie), which hired
the opposition-research hit men at Fusion GPS. Fusion in turn tapped a former
British spook, Christopher Steele, to compile the allegations, which are based
largely on anonymous, Kremlin-connected sources.
Strip out the middlemen, and it appears that Democrats
paid for Russians to compile wild allegations about a U.S. presidential
candidate. Did someone say “collusion”?
This news is all the more explosive because
the DNC and Clinton campaign hid their role, even amid the media
furor after BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier in January. Reporters are now
saying that Clinton campaign officials lied to them about their role in the
dossier. Current DNC Chair Tom Perez and former Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
deny knowing about the dossier arrangement, but someone must have known.
Perhaps this explains why Congressional
Democrats have been keen to protect Fusion from answering dossier questions—disrupting
hearings, protesting subpoenas and deriding Republican investigators. Two of
Fusion’s cofounders invoked their Fifth Amendment rights last week rather
than answer House Intelligence Committee questions, and Fusion filed a federal
lawsuit on Friday to block committee subpoenas of its bank records.
The more troubling question is whether the
FBI played a role, even if inadvertently, in assisting a Russian disinformation
campaign. We know the agency possessed the dossier in 2016, and
according to media reports it debated paying Mr. Steele to continue his work in
the runup to the election. This occurred while former FBI Director James
Comey was ramping up his probe into supposed ties between the Trump campaign
and Russians.
Two pertinent questions: Did the dossier
trigger the FBI probe of the Trump campaign, and did Mr. Comey or his agents
use it as evidence to seek wiretapping approval from the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court of Trump campaign aides?
Congressional investigators need to focus on
the FBI’s role, and House Speaker Paul Ryan was correct Wednesday to insist
that the bureau comply with Congress’s document demands “immediately.” Mr.
Sessions has recused himself from the Justice Department’s Russia probe, but
he and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein can still insist on transparency. Mr. Ryan should
also reinstall Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes as lead on the Russia
investigation, since it appears the Democratic accusations against him were
aimed in part at throwing him off the Fusion trail.
All of this also raises questions about
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The
Fusion news means the FBI’s role in Russia’s election interference must now
be investigated—even as the FBI and Justice insist that Mr. Mueller’s probe
prevents them from cooperating with Congressional investigators.
Mr. Mueller is a former FBI director, and for years he
worked closely with Mr. Comey. It is no slur against Mr. Mueller’s integrity
to say that he lacks the critical distance to conduct a credible probe of the
bureau he ran for a dozen years. He could best serve the country by resigning
to prevent further political turmoil over that conflict of interest.
The American public deserves a full accounting of the
scope and nature of Russian meddling in American democracy, and that means
following the trail of the Steele dossier as much as it does the meetings of
Trump campaign officials.
