By John Solomon | The Hill
Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top
FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of
Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before
the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign.
Former FBI general counsel James Baker met during the
2016 season with at least one attorney from Perkins Coie, the Democratic
National Committee’s private law firm.
That’s the firm used by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s
campaign to secretly
pay research firm Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, a
former British intelligence operative, to compile a dossier of uncorroborated
raw intelligence alleging Trump and Moscow were colluding to hijack the
presidential election.
The dossier, though mostly unverified, was
then used
by the FBI as the main evidence seeking a Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign in
the final days of the campaign.
The revelation was confirmed both in contemporaneous
evidence and testimony secured by a joint investigation by Republicans on the
House Judiciary and Government Oversight committees, my source tells me.
It means the FBI had good reason to suspect
the dossier was connected to the DNC’s main law firm and was the product of a
Democratic opposition-research effort to defeat Trump — yet failed to disclose
that information to the FISA court in October 2016, when the bureau applied for
a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
“This is a bombshell that unequivocally shows
the real collusion was between the FBI and Donald Trump’s opposition — the DNC,
Hillary and a Trump-hating British intel officer — to hijack the election,
rather than some conspiracy between Putin and Trump,” a knowledgeable source
told me.
Baker was interviewed
by lawmakers behind closed doors on Wednesday. Sources
declined to divulge his testimony, other than to say it confirmed other
evidence about the contact between the Perkins Coie law firm and the FBI.
The sources also said Baker’s interview broke new ground both
about the FBI’s use of news media in 2016 and 2017 to further the Trump case
and about Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s
conversations in spring 2017 regarding possible use
of a body wire to record Trump.
“The interview was one of the most productive we had and
it opened up many new investigative leads,” one source said.
Another said Baker could not answer some questions about
FBI media contacts, citing an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department
inspector general into alleged
illegal leaks, during and after the election, about the
Trump collusion probe and other matters.
These revelations illustrate anew how much
the FBI and Justice Department have withheld from the public about their
collaboration and collusion with clearly partisan elements of the Clinton
campaign and the DNC, Fusion and Steele, that were trying to defeat Trump.
The growing body of evidence that the FBI
used mostly politically-motivated, unverified intelligence from an opponent to
justify spying on the GOP nominee’s campaign — just weeks before
Election Day — has prompted a growing number of Republicans to ask President Trump to declassify
the rest of the FBI’s main documents in the Russia collusion
case.
House Speaker Paul Ryan
(R-Wis.), House Freedom Caucus leaders Mark Meadows
(R-N.C.) and Jim
Jordan (R-Ohio), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes
(R-Calif.), veteran investigator Rep. Trey Gowdy
(R-S.C.) and many others have urged the president to act on declassification
even as FBI and Justice Department have tried to persuade the president to keep
documents secret.
Ryan has said he believes the declassification will
uncover potential FBI abuses of the FISA process. Jordan said he believes there
is strong evidence the bureau misled the FISA court. Nunes has said the FBI
intentionally hid exculpatory evidence from the judges.
And Meadows told The
Hill’s new morning television show, Rising, on Wednesday
that there is evidence the FBI had sources secretly record members of the Trump
campaign.
“There’s a strong suggestion that confidential human
sources actually taped members within the Trump campaign,” Meadows told Hill.TV
hosts Krystal Ball and Ned Ryun.
John Solomon is an award-winning
investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI
intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse
of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of
political corruption. He is The Hill’s executive vice president for video.
