John Durham testimony: FBI’s treatment of Hillary Clinton under microscope at hearing
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A House Judiciary Committee hearing focused on the FBI’s treatment of former President Donald Trump paid considerable attention to his former rival Hillary Clinton.
The hearing on Wednesday featured former special counsel John Durham as the sole witness on his report, released last month, about the origins of the Russia collusion investigation that began in 2016.
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Durham had concluded that the FBI did not have any evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia at the time it opened a full investigation, nor did it ever obtain evidence despite years of digging.
But less high-profile sections of Durham’s report had presented previously unreported instances of misconduct related to the Clinton campaign, and those surfaced throughout his appearance in the House this week.
“The FBI’s investigative efforts were considerably more disciplined than was the case with respect to Mr. Trump,” Durham said of the approach to allegations leveled in 2016 against Clinton.
Overall, Durham said, the FBI’s treatment of Clinton was “not necessarily more favorable, just more disciplined” than the aggressive pursuit of Trump in 2016 by agents who openly discussed their disdain for him.
In one example, on which Durham faced questions from GOP lawmakers, the Department of Justice decided to warn the Clinton campaign that foreign nationals may have wanted to infiltrate her campaign while withholding that knowledge from the Trump campaign.
DOJ officials “required defensive briefings to be provided to Clinton and other officials or candidates who appeared to be the targets of foreign interference,” Durham wrote in his report.
“No defensive briefing was provided to Trump or anyone in the campaign concerning the information received from Australia that suggested there might be some type of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, either prior to or after these investigations were opened,” he wrote.
Speaking to the committee, Durham said “very little thought” appeared to have been given to the idea that Trump might also deserve a defensive briefing in light of the suggestion that Russians could be targeting his campaign.
The FBI opened its full investigation of Trump, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane, just days after receiving a tip from Australian diplomats that they’d heard an unpaid Trump adviser boasting in a bar about a vague offer of campaign assistance from Russia. The Australian intelligence was unverified, and indeed proven later to be false, but nonetheless formed the basis for a full-blown criminal investigation.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) questioned Durham over the contrast between those bold steps and the FBI’s reluctance to act on intelligence about Clinton it received at virtually the same time.
“In the summer of 2016, did our government receive intelligence that suggested Secretary Clinton had approved a plan to tie President Trump to Russia?” Jordan asked.
“Yes,” replied Durham.
“Did [then-FBI Director James Comey] share it with the agents on the case, working the Crossfire Hurricane case?” Jordan later asked.
“No,” Durham replied.
In his report, Durham had detailed how the FBI received credible intelligence showing that Clinton approved a campaign plot to frame Trump for having suspicious ties to Russia, just before lawyers on her payroll began sharing campaign-funded opposition research with the FBI that did indeed allege suspicious ties between Trump and Russia.
The CIA took the intelligence seriously enough for its director to brief then-President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Comey, and other senior Obama administration officials. The CIA put the intelligence into a memo referring the intelligence to the FBI for investigation.
But that intelligence never made it into applications the FBI filed to get surveillance warrants targeting a former Trump adviser, nor were the FBI agents working the Trump collusion investigation ever told of the intelligence even though it should have fundamentally altered how seriously the bureau took the collusion allegations.
Durham testified on Wednesday that the campaign plot, which was never investigated, was one of several instances of “disparate treatment” he uncovered during his investigation.
Another related to a potentially illegal contribution to the Clinton campaign on behalf of a foreign national “who was known to the FBI to have foreign intelligence and criminal connections,” Durham wrote in his report.
The FBI’s own confidential source made the donation; instead of investigating the foreign bribery effort in which the source was involved, the FBI advised the source to steer clear of the Clinton campaign for his or her “protection,” shut down any investigation into the matter, and never even documented the episode in FBI records, Durham wrote.
In another instance raised during the House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, an analyst on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team pushed to interview Charles Dolan, a Clinton-connected Democratic operative who provided some of the allegations for the false Steele dossier.
Dolan’s work with the Clinton family dates back decades.
After that analyst pushed in 2017 to open an investigation into Dolan, who himself had significant Russian ties and had been spending time in Russia, the analyst was reassigned to a different unit and told to drop the matter. Dolan was never interviewed by the FBI despite contributing considerably to the document it was using to justify major parts of its investigation.
The focus on Clinton comes as House Republicans work to build a case, across multiple fronts, that the Justice Department has begun to implement a two-tiered system of justice.
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They pushed that argument further this week when Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, struck a lenient plea deal with the Biden administration that spared him jail time for evading taxes and illegally obtaining a gun.
Hunter Biden had been under investigation for those and potentially other offenses for years. However, the long-awaited charges dropped only weeks after House Republicans publicized separate whistleblower allegations, one from the IRS and one from the FBI, that investigators were stonewalling investigations of the president’s son.
Tags: John Durham, News, 2016 Elections, Hillary Clinton, Department of Justice
Original Author: Sarah Bedford
Original Location: John Durham testimony: FBI’s treatment of Hillary Clinton under microscope at hearing