Deception by Redaction: More FBI FISA Abuses, This Time Using Fake News in the Washington Post

That Yahoo article by Michael Isikoff said the allegations had been confirmed by a “well-placed Western intelligence source.” Isikoff later revealed that the source, former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, had concocted the false allegation about Page in a series of now-debunked memos financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Hence, Steele was “corroborating” his own shoddy work. Instead of following the law and verifying this material before including it in the FISA application, the FBI simply repeated it as fact. In 2018, Isikoff said it was “a bit beyond me” why the bureau referenced his article.  

The officials who spoke to RCI said the inclusion of the since-retracted Post story may be even more egregious because it was unsourced, which should have sent red flags flying at the FBI. Post reporters said a key source of the dossier’s allegations was a Belarusian-American businessman named Sergei Millian. The Post, however, provided no source for this blockbuster claim, which Millian vociferously denied.

The FBI’s reliance on the false Post story was “an act of desperation,” noted one of the officials. In late March 2017, he said the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia faced a dilemma. A court deadline to reapply for a warrant to spy on Page was fast approaching, and it still hadn’t verified the sourcing for the key “conspiracy” charge against him and the Trump campaign.

Moreover, agents had reason to be skeptical about the information, which formed the cornerstone of their case.

Over the previous two months, the FBI had conducted a series of interviews with Igor Danchenko, a Russia-born Washington-based researcher who helped compile Steele’s dossier of derogatory information about Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, including the core “conspiracy” assertion. During the debriefings, Danchenko confessed he couldn’t be sure his alleged source, Millian, actually told him what he attributed to him about Page in the dossier.

The FBI needed the explosive allegation to be true because it was the heart of the factual information supporting probable cause to electronically monitor Page as a supposed Russian collaborator under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The FISA law, initially enacted in 1978 and broadened in the aftermath of 9/11, is now under intense scrutiny on Capitol Hill in light of previously exposed FBI abuses of the congressionally granted surveillance power. The bureau included the information in earlier requests for wiretaps, but they were set to expire in early April 2017. To justify renewing them another 90 days, the FBI was under pressure to show FISA judges additional evidence to support its suspicions about Page. Validating Millian as the main source of the dossier was critical, but the agents had come up empty, developing no evidence that corroborated the allegations.

Just in time, the Washington Post published a story online on March 29, 2017, that supposedly “confirmed” Millian was the source of the allegations against Page and the core claim of a Trump-Kremlin conspiracy. The strangely unsourced article carried the headline, “Who is ‘Source D’? The man said to be behind the Trump-Russia dossier’s most salacious claim: The story of Sergei Millian.” The next day, the Post ran the same story on Page One of the paper, but under the headline: “Insider or opportunist? A wild card in Russia story: Businessman said to be source of spy dossier’s salacious claim about Trump.” The above-the-fold article appeared just eight days prior to the April 7 deadline the FBI faced to resubmit an application to the FISA court for a fresh warrant to secretly monitor Page.

In its April 7 affidavit requesting a renewal of the warrant, FBI headquarters advised the FISA court that the Post had confirmed that Millian was the source for the dossier’s allegation that the Kremlin was “feeding” the Trump campaign “very helpful” dirt on Clinton through Page. It also cited the article to buttress the dossier’s linchpin allegation of a “conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and the Russian leadership, according to the two officials who have seen what is behind the blacked-out section of the sworn affidavit, which runs more than 100 pages. The references to the Post appear on page 22 of the FISA document.

As a result, the FISA court renewed the wiretaps. It approved them again on June 29, 2017, based in part on the same supposedly corroborative Washington Post article, according to the two officials, who have also seen the original, unredacted June application. On the strength of essentially fake news, surveillance court judges permitted the FBI to continue to vacuum up all of Page’s communications through Sept. 22, 2017.

The Post was forced to retract its story in November 2021 when Durham proved in a court filing that Danchenko had never actually spoken to Millian and simply invented him as his source — and therefore made up the “conspiracy” allegation and everything else he attributed to Millian. A week after Durham debunked the Millian hoax, Washington Post Executive Editor Sally Buzbee said the Post could no longer stand behind the accuracy of the story and ordered the newspaper to print a retraction.

But in 2017, the story served the FBI’s purposes, even as agents came to doubt the Millian sourcing because of Danchenko’s dissembling (yet, agents nonetheless swore to the FISA court that Danchenko had been “truthful and cooperative”). Headquarters had to hang on to the slim chance it could be true because the Millian-sourced allegations were central to their case for spying on the Trump campaign. Without them, the case would have collapsed. Former FBI officials say it’s highly unlikely the bureau would have been able to convince the spy court to continue to grant permission to monitor Page.

The FBI also relied on other allegations sourced to Millian as both “Source E” and “Source D” in the Steele dossier, including the made-up story that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a compromising sex tape of Trump cavorting with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. The entire dossier turned out to be a series of invented rumors or outright fabrications that the FBI knew at the time were underwritten by the Hillary Clinton campaign as political opposition research.

FBI veterans who have sworn out affidavits for FISA wiretaps told RCI they have never known the bureau to cite media stories as evidence to corroborate leads or support probable cause to obtain such all-invasive warrants from the spy court.

“Absolutely not,” said former assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker. “I signed scores of FISA orders as they moved up the chain of command from the field office up to headquarters for final approval. None of them included that type of information, which is absolutely malpractice and incompetence, or worse.”

“Never, ever, ever,” added 27-year FBI veteran special agent Michael Biasello. “The FISA verification process known as the Woods Procedures was created to eliminate this problem, but [then-FBI Director James] Comey’s hand-picked bunch at headquarters did not follow them. They were a bunch of arrogant investigators relying on erroneous and tainted information from Washington reporters rather than a traditional, responsible investigation gathering the facts.”

Biasello said resorting to using such a murky newspaper story to backstop the main thrust of the FBI’s surveillance case suggests its case was more of a political fishing expedition than a legitimate national security matter. He added that the FBI and DOJ are now trying to cover up the full breadth of their FISA scandal through unjustified redactions and classifications.

The FBI and DOJ refuse to fully declassify the documents, which Senate Republicans managed to release to the public in 2020, albeit with large sections blacked out. Whole pages of the renewal applications remain secret, even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court invalidated the warrants in the wake of a scathing 2019 inspector’s general report. The IG found the spy warrants were based on allegations fabricated by Clinton-funded researchers and had omitted exculpatory information proving the innocence of Page, a former U.S. Navy lieutenant, whom the FBI knew was working for U.S., not Russian, intelligence.

Special Counsel Durham did not uncover what’s lurking beneath the FISA redactions in a recently released report of his four-year criminal investigation of FBI misconduct in the Russiagate probe. He explained that because of the “sensitive and classified nature” of certain “portions” of the FISA applications, he was compelled to discuss them only in a Classified Appendix to the report. He said the classification effort was “coordinated” with the FBI.

In other words, much of the FBI’s wrongdoing remains shielded from public view.

Unusual Handling by Washington Post

Instead of appending a correction, the paper, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its Trump-Russia reporting, removed all references to Millian as the dossier’s source in online and archived versions of the original article, including all citations cataloged in the Lexis-Nexis database of news articles. It also took down a video that accompanied the story. The paper then reposted a new article with a different headline – “Sergei Millian: High-level access to Trump or unwitting bystander?” – but under the same bylines of Tom Hamburger and Rosalind Helderman, who shared the controversial 2018 Pulitzer (although the Millian article was not part of its entry).

The new version of the story contains an “Editor’s Note” noting the date when the original was published, but oddly, it does not link to it. In a story the Post ran reporting on its “unusual step of correcting and removing large portions” of the article, it also failed to link to the original version of the article and only linked to the retooled one. The original version has been scrubbed from Google and Twitter.

Journalism historians say they are not aware of another major newspaper making wholesale changes to a story four years afterward and republishing an edited version of the story.

In a statement to RCI, a spokeswoman for the Post shrugged off criticism. “The Post handled this correction with complete transparency,” said Kathy Baird, the paper’s chief communications officer. “As you can see in the Editor’s Note, portions of the story and an accompanying video were removed and the headline was changed,” she added. “This is consistent with the principles and practices we follow when issuing corrections for our readers so that all published information is up-to-date and accurate.”
Another curious aspect of the story is how it got through Post editors without any sourcing or attribution. Normally such a sensitive story, which potentially libeled Millian, would require intense scrutiny, if not a legal review.