Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), during a remarkable exchange with FBI Director Christopher Wray at a hearing Thursday, suggested that Peter Strzok — the FBI official who was removed from the special counsel team — was responsible for using the Clinton-funded dossier to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.
If true, it would be a stunning development in the Russia investigation. It would mean that a top FBI official took what was an unverified piece of opposition research funded by Trump’s political opponent, and used it to obtain a surveillance warrant on the Trump campaign.
“If this happened, if you had the FBI working with a campaign, the Democrats’ campaign, taking opposition research, dressing it all up and turning it into an intelligence document and taking it to the FISA court so they could spy on the other campaign — if that happened, that is as wrong as gets,” Jordan told Wray.
It is also not clear yet whether Strzok or other FBI officials used the dossier to launch the investigation into the Trump campaign, which has cast a cloud of suspicion and fueled partisan attacks against the Trump administration until this day.
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As recently reported, Strzok was the No. 2 official at the FBI’s counterintelligence division, and played a major role in the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s email server. He recommended watering down language in a statement exonerating Hillary Clinton from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.”
Strzok would later sign the documents launching the probe into the Trump campaign. He would also unnecessarily interview former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in January 2017 about his calls with a Russian ambassador, when he had not done anything wrong. Later, Flynn would be charged with lying to the FBI.
Strzok was kicked off the special counsel team in July, with the FBI and Justice Department refusing to tell the House intelligence committee why. It was not until orchestrated leaks to the Washington Post and the New York Times over the weekend that it was revealed that Strzok had sent anti-Trump text messages to another lawyer on the special counsel team, Lisa Page, with whom he was having an extramarital affair.
Jordan suggested during his exchange with Wray that Strzok would not be removed for just the anti-Trump texts, since FBI officials are allowed to have political opinions, share those opinions privately, and when many other members of the Special Counsel team have also already expressed their political bias by donating to Clinton and other Democrats.
Jordan suggested it had something to do with the dossier.