Former Attorney General William Barr chastised The New York Times after it critically reported on special counsel John Durham’s investigation into potential misconduct in the Trump-Russia probe.
On Wednesday, Barr broke his silence while speaking to a reporter after delivering a speech in Sacramento, California. He pushed back on aspects of an article that was published last week, which detailed alleged problems in Durham’s endeavor.
“They ignored some fundamental facts as to why some of the information that Durham was seeking was very important information,” Barr charged, according to the Los Angeles Times. He also said the article missed “obvious reasons” for Durham’s investigation.
The New York Times responded to the article, saying that they stand “behind this story and the reporting it contains,” The original report noted Barr declined to comment for the article.
Not long after special counsel Robert Mueller released his report in May 2019, Barr appointed then-U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut Durham in an bid to investigate the origins and conduct of the FBI inquiry into alleged ties between former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
Durham was elevated to special counsel status in the final months of the Trump administration, giving him extra protections to continue his work once President Joe Biden took office.
Trump and his allies often champion Durham’s investigation as a means to unravel a suspected “Russiagate” plot against the former president, but Democrats have criticized the inquiry as a politically tainted endeavor, aiming to discredit Mueller and other top FBI officials.
The report from The NY Times only gave fuel to Durham’s detractors in Congress, prompting Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) to threaten an investigation while House Democrats pressed the Justice Department inspector general to start a review to determine whether Barr or Durham “violated any laws, DOJ rules or practices, or canons of legal ethics.”
The article, published on January 26, said a months-long review by The Times “found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court.”
The article also outlined how Durham’s investigation “became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes,” which prompted resignations by some prosecutors on the team, including Nora Dannehy, Durham’s second in command, who allegedly disliked how Barr spoke ominously about the probe’s findings in public.
Barr, who made an appearance at the California News Publishers Annual Capital Conference, rejected the idea that Durham’s appointment was problematic from the start.
“The idea that there was a thin basis for doing it doesn’t hold water,” Barr said. “Because it wasn’t started as a criminal investigation. One of the duties of the attorney general is to protect against the abuse of criminal and intelligence powers, that they’re not abused to impinge on political activity, so I felt it was my duty to find out what happened there.”
Barr also defended himself from one of the most explosive claims in the article: that Durham expanded his inquiry in the fall of 2019 to include a criminal investigation into “suspicious financial dealings” tied to Trump in response to a tip from Italian officials. The report itself asserted that the details were largely unclear and did not result in Durham bringing charges.
Barr insisted the tip “was not directly about Trump,” arguing that it was appropriate to bring into Durham’s investigation because “it did have a relationship to the Russiagate stuff. It was not completely separate from it. And it turned out to be a complete non-issue.”
Durham has secured one guilty plea thus far, from former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith. He was accused of falsifying a document in efforts to renew the authority to conduct FISA surveillance on onetime Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. Clinesmith was spared prison time, but faced a one-year bar suspension.
Durham experienced setbacks last year after prosecutions against former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko, a key source for British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s largely-debunked dossier, ended in acquittal in Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia, respectively.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has said he would “like as much as possible to be made public,” when Durham’s report is complete but stressed there will be Privacy Act concerns and classification to consider.
“I think [Durham]’s going to explain, to the extent he’s allowed to put it out, the whole genesis of [the Russia interference claims] and how it all occurred,” Barr told the LA Times. “So what’s wrong with that? You review something, you get the facts. Yes, we wanted to hold people accountable if something came up that indicated criminality, or you could prove criminality. But it wasn’t a criminal investigation, it was a review to get the story. And he got the story.”
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