Trey Gowdy: FISA warrant wouldn’t have been granted without the Steele dossier

On Sunday, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) made powerful assertion on CBS’ “Face the Nation” with host Margaret Brennan, claiming that the FISA warrant wouldn’t have been granted without the Steele dossier.

Transcript:

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BRENNAN: We should dig into this because you are, from my understanding, the only Republican investigator on the House Intelligence Committee who actually viewed the FISA applications. Everything that went into essentially putting together this memo. So, when you’re talking about this Steele memo, you are not saying that it was the sole piece of evidence used to justify these four authorizations of the surveillance warrant, are you?

GOWDY: No. It was not the exclusive information relied upon by the FISA court.

BRENNAN: Would it have been authorized were it not for that dossier?

GOWDY: No, it would not have been.

BRENNAN: How can you say that because it was authorized four times by separate judges?

GOWDY: Right, and the information was in there all four times. And the judge doesn’t do independent research. There are three Republicans that have seen every bit of information — three of us. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), the Chairman of the Judiciary, Johnny Ratcliffe (R-TX), who was a former terrorism prosecutor and a U.S. attorney in Texas, and me.

All three of us have total confidence in the FBI and DOJ to be able to do the jobs that they have been assigned; we have confidence in Bob Mueller; and we have serious concerns about this process. So, we have all three of those things in common, including being concerned about what happened in 2016.

BRENNAN: Should all the information in the FISA applications be publicly disclosed, declassified, so that people can make their own judgment and see what you’ve seen?

GOWDY: I think — I’m gonna defer a little bit to the Bureau and the DOJ on — it’s a long application. If there are sources and methods that are not already known, that they think would jeopardize national security, I would defer to their judgment. The source that we revealed, Chris Steele, was about the least well-kept secret in America. So, generally, I err on the side of transparency and disclosure. On the other hand, there’s a reason that this process is usually confidential, and I don’t want to set the precedent of all FISA applications being publicly seen.