Democratic Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein, issued a minority report today criticizing the criminal referral that fellow committee members, Senators Grassley and Graham, sent to the Department of Justice over Christopher Steele, the author of the controversial Steele dossier. Grassley and Graham have accused Steele of giving the Department of Justice misleading information and asked the DOJ to look into whether Steele broke any laws.
Grassley and Graham allude to the fact that the Steele Dossier was the “second in a series” and that information contained in the dossier came from the U.S. State Department and an associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s.
Feinstein writes, “[The referral does not]… provide any evidence that any of the information in Steele’s dossier is wrong. Instead, the referral is limited to a single baseless allegation: that Steele lied about his contacts with the press.”
Feinstein also refutes the claim that some of the information in the Steele dossier came from friends of the Clintons’. “The criminal referral fails to address the fact that 14 of the 17 memos in the Steele dossier published by Buzzfeed were created by Mr. Steele before this October 19 report. It would have been impossible for Mr. Steele to include information that he received in an October 19 report from ‘a friend of the Clintons’ in his 14 earlier reports, which date back to June 20, 2016,” Feinstein writes.
Even the Republican memo released by the House Intelligence Committee, Feinstein argues, acknowledges that the origins of the FBI’s inquiry into the Trump campaign was a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, and statements he made about Russian help to an Australian diplomat who, in turn, notified U.S. officials.
“This Committee,” Feinstein wrote, “should dedicate its resources and attention to getting to the bottom of exactly what Russia did during the 2016 election and who was involved – not attacking voluntary sources and the nation’s leading law enforcement agencies.”
Senators Grassley and Graham did not respond to requests for comment before this article was printed.