Analysis: The Russia-probe theories that Trump has empowered Barr to investigate
President Trump speaks about the investigations into himself and his administration at the White House on May 22, 2019. By Philip Bump Philip Bump National correspondent focused largely on the numbers behind politics Email Bio Follow May 24 at 11:15 AM President Trump has a habit of developing verbal shorthand for complex issues that he talks about a lot. Over time, Trump wears down a broad point until he can wave at it with a brief phrase.
Giving Barr that authority is an escalation of Trump’s war on the Russia probe. Trump is empowering a loyal ally to produce and release information that might bolster or be interpreted as bolstering the prevailing theories about how bias led to the investigation. In 2016, Peter Strzok was an FBI agent in the Bureau’s counterintelligence section. Strzok led the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and, on July 31, opened the investigation into possible coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russia’s efforts to interfere in the election.
These messages in particular have been used to argue that Strzok was deeply biased against Trump, aiming to prevent his election or, in the case that he won, establishing an insurance policy against him -- presumably, Trump allies argue, bulking up allegations about Russia that could be used to remove him from office.
There are just a few problems with the theory: There’s no evidence that the investigation was launched because of anti-Trump bias and, in fact, plenty of justification for it to have been launched. There’s a subtext there that’s important. Strzok was arguing that Trump still might win but they still didn’t leverage the information they had in order to damage Trump’s candidacy. In fact, Strzok helped then-FBI director James Comey draft the letter that he released in late October, which Clinton has blamed for contributing to her defeat.“I cannot believe we are seriously looking at these allegations and the pervasive connections,” he wrote.
The information in Steele’s report largely remains uncorroborated and has, in some parts, been debunked. Nunes’s memo and other since have argued that the FBI knew that Steele’s information was questionable before the Page FISA warrant was issued but used it in the warrant application anyway. This allegation takes a number of forms, including questions about how the FBI presented purported external corroboration about what the dossier had reported about Page.
While the Steele dossier does make up a significant portion of the initial FISA warrant application, it’s not the only evidence included in the application . The extent to which the FBI trusted the information in the dossier isn’t clear, though Steele had served as a source for the Bureau in the past.
As for the failure to mention Fusion GPS’s financial sponsors by name? Baker said that the included footnote about the motivations of the information was “sufficient to put the court on notice.” At one point, Halper was joined during a meeting with Papadopoulos by a woman named Azra Turk, who pressed the Trump campaign adviser directly on possible interactions with Russia. Turk, the New York Times reported, was sent by the FBI.
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