The Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating the Justice Department’s effort to shut down an investigation into the Clinton campaign’s funding of the infamous Steele Dossier.
The committee’s chairman, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, said a whistleblower has revealed two top officials in the Justice Department’s Arctic Frost investigation of President Trump had earlier played pivotal roles in blocking an FBI probe into Hillary Clinton and other Democrats.
Mr. Grassley, Iowa Republican, released email exchanges between an unidentified FBI agent and Richard Pilger, who worked for the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, and J.P. Cooney, then a lawyer in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
The correspondence, which took place in June of 2019, documented Mr. Pilger and Mr. Cooney slapping down the FBI agent’s inquiry about what the agent described as the “unambiguous concealment” of payments the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign made to finance the anti-Trump dossier compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele.
The DNC and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid opposition research company Fusion GPS to produce the unverified and salacious Steele dossier, which was used to torpedo Mr. Trump, who was Mrs. Clinton’s chief political opponent.
The Democrats concealed their role in funding the dossier by reporting the expenditures as payments for legal services.
The FBI agent, in an email to an unnamed supervisor, said that Mr. Pilger used veiled threats “intended to have a chilling effect and stop me from asking questions,” about the Clinton campaign and DNC payments.
“In my [redacted] years of being an agent, a successful agent with a great reputation, I have never been met with such suspicion or response intended to have me go away,” the FBI agent wrote.
Mr. Pilger, who served as the Justice Department’s Election Crimes Branch director, later became a pivotal figure in greenlighting the Arctic Frost investigation into Mr. Trump’s actions following the 2020 presidential election. The Arctic Frost probe was headed by Special Counsel Jack Smith, and it resulted in the indictment of Mr. Trump on election interference charges.
Mr. Cooney served as Mr. Smith’s deputy.
Mr. Grassley, in a letter sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, asked for additional records and emails related to the thwarted FBI probe into the DNC and Clinton campaign payments to Fusion GPS.
“These records show the same partisans who rushed to cover for Clinton rabidly pursued Arctic Frost, which was a runaway train aimed directly at President Trump and the Republican political apparatus,” Mr. Grassley said.
In a June 21, 2019, email, Mr. Pilger chastises the FBI agent for asking to open an investigation into the concealment of the payments, accusing the agent of “bias” and a “rush to judgment.” Mr. Cooney, writing to the agent a week earlier on June 14, told the agent the matter “is not a good candidate to open for a false reporting case,” because Fusion GPS was hired by the Clinton campaign’s law firm, Perkins Coie, and not the campaign directly.
“Although not typically what we think of as legal services, I think we would have an exceedingly difficult time proving it was a willfully false report,” Mr. Cooney wrote to the agent.
The dossier, which was discredited as a compilation of unproven rumors, made outlandish allegations about Mr. Trump’s connection to Russia. One of the claims placed Mr. Trump in a Moscow hotel room with hired hookers, who he supposedly ordered to urinate on a bed where the Obamas once slept. The dossier was circulated ahead of the 2016 election in a bid to damage Mr. Trump, and was then used by the FBI under Director James Comey to justify a secret investigation and spy operation targeting the Trump campaign.
Neither the Clinton campaign nor the DNC was investigated criminally for the false finance reporting, but instead faced civil charges after watchdog groups filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission.
In 2022, the FEC fined the Clinton campaign $8,000 and the DNC $105,000 for hiding the true purpose of more than $1 million in payments to the law firm Perkins Coie that was used to pay Fusion GPS.
The FEC said the two entities “misreported the purpose of certain disbursements.”
The DNC called the complaints to the FEC about their misreporting of the funds “aging and silly.”
In May 2024, Mr. Trump became the first former president convicted of felonies after a New York jury found him guilty of concealing hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, which prosecutors said illegally influenced the 2016 election.
Trump is appealing the conviction and attempting to have it moved to federal court.
Mr. Cooney left the Justice Department in January and runs a law firm in the District of Columbia. He did not immediately respond to an inquiry. Mr. Pilger also rejoined the private sector in 2022 as a private attorney. He could not be reached for comment.