Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is investigating the FBI’s probe of the Trump campaign, on Friday accused former FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap of providing misleading information to the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding the Steele dossier.
“You’ve got Bill Priestap on Feb. 15th, 2018, with four other people from the FBI briefing this Senate Intel Committee, completely whitewashing the truth about the reliability of the dossier,” Graham said in a Fox News interview on Friday.
Graham accused Priestap and his FBI colleagues of downplaying information that Igor Danchenko, the primary source for dossier author Christopher Steele, provided the FBI in January 2017. He also said that he intends to share information about the briefing with John Durham, the U.S. attorney conducting a sprawling investigation of the FBI and CIA’s Trump-related activities.
“What I want to do with this is turn it over to Durham because I think the briefing in 2018, a year after the sub-source told the FBI it was a bunch of garbage, whitewashing that report to the Senate Intel Committee is potentially another crime,” Graham said.
Priestap has largely avoided scrutiny amid revelations of FBI misdeeds in its probe of the Trump campaign. But a review of a Justice Department inspector general’s (IG) report of that investigation shows that Priestap withheld information that undercut dossier author Christopher Steele’s credibility.
According to the IG report, Priestap told the watchdog that he withheld derogatory information he obtained regarding Steele from the Crossfire Hurricane team because of an agreement he struck with officials at MI6.
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