The Senate Judiciary Committee will begin holding hearings in early June to review the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation and issues related to Michael Flynn, Sen. Lindsey Graham announced Thursday.
“The Judiciary Committee will begin holding multiple, in-depth congressional hearings regarding all things related to Crossfire Hurricane starting in early June,” Graham, the chairman of the Judiciary panel, said in a statement Thursday.
Graham said the first phase of the inquiry will focus on the Justice Department’s decision on May 7 to dismiss charges against Flynn. The committee will also conduct an “in-depth analysis of the unmasking requests made by Obama Administration officials against General Flynn.”
“We must determine if these requests were legitimate.”
On Wednesday, two Republican senators released a list of Obama administration officials who submitted requests to unmask Flynn’s name in intelligence reports in the weeks before President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn leaves after the delay in his sentencing hearing at US District Court in Washington, DC, December 18, 2018. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
The records showed that former Vice President Joe Biden, former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan and dozens of other officials submitted requests that unmasked Flynn’s name in the intelligence reports. (RELATED: Biden, Comey, Brennan Submitted Unmasking Requests For Michael Flynn)
Graham said that later in the summer, the committee will dig further into the Justice Department inspector general’s (IG) report on the FBI’s abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in its investigation of Carter Page, the former Trump campaign aide.
The IG report said that the FBI committed 17 “significant” errors and omissions in its applications to wiretap Page. Many of the errors centered around the FBI’s handling of the infamous and unverified Steele dossier. Footnotes in the IG report said that the FBI had evidence of Russian disinformation in the dossier, which was written by former British spy Christopher Steele.
“My goal is to find out why and how the system got so off the rails,” said Graham.
Graham did not specify the witnesses he plans to call for the hearings.
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