U.S. attorney John Durham’s high-profile yet secretive review of the Russia investigation is expected to finish this summer but may be delayed by the coronavirus outbreak.
The top federal prosecutor for Connecticut was on pace to finish his inquiry sometime in the summer, according to a report by Fox News on Monday. One source “suggested the investigation could end as soon as July.” Another “said it could be closer to September, based on Durham’s progress, which could be hindered by the coronavirus pandemic rocking the nation and the globe.”
The deadly illness has already disrupted much of everyday life.
During a Monday news conference at the White House, President Trump advised that the public avoid gatherings of more than 10 people, food courts, and restaurants. State and local governments shut down bars and theaters across the country. Trump said that “people are talking about July, August, something like that” for when the COVID-19 crisis in the United States might subside.
As of Monday afternoon, there were 181,127 confirmed coronavirus cases around the world and at least 7,115 deaths tied to the infection, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. There were 4,287 cases inside the U.S., which have resulted in 74 deaths.
The COVID-19 pandemic has impeded federal, state, and local courts, including the postponement of March oral arguments in the Supreme Court.
Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, told colleagues during a House Rules Committee meeting last week that Durham’s inquiry is expected to end after the spring. “His investigation, and his report, if there’s a report, is due to be completed sometime this summer,” Jordan said.
He mentioned it after Rep. Michael Burgess, a Republican from Texas, asked whether “anybody is going to be accountable now,” referring to the 17 “significant errors or omissions” the Justice Department inspector general found in the DOJ and the FBI’s use of British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier when pursuing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to wiretap onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Jordan, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, said that this is exactly why Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham to the task. The congressman also mentioned Kevin Clinesmith, a former FBI lawyer under criminal investigation by Durham after Inspector General Michael Horowitz found he altered a key document in FISA filings related to Page, a U.S. citizen who was suspected of being an agent of Russia but was never charged with wrongdoing.
“I gotta believe that individual at some point is going to be held accountable,” Jordan said.
Durham was appointed last year by Barr to review possible misconduct by federal law enforcement and intelligence officials in the Russia investigation. The review upgraded into a criminal investigation in the fall, allowing Durham the power to impanel a grand jury and hand down indictments.
Rep. Doug Collins, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News in late February that “this is not going to be a Mueller report — there won’t be a report.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report, released last April, found that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Collins said he believes the public will hear about the progress Durham has made if and when there is an indictment.
“When he’s ready to charge people, he’ll charge people,” Collins said. “And that’s when we’ll know.”
“I have faith that Durham is going to get to the bottom of this,” House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, a California Republican, said at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference. “I really do.”
Democrats have criticized the review as a politically motivated scheme to undermine the work of Mueller and attack Trump’s perceived enemies. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler sought an interview with Durham and nearly two dozen other DOJ officials as part of an inquiry into “recent actions that smack of political interference.”
Trump gave Barr “full and complete authority to declassify information” in the “investigation of the investigators” last year. Durham was assigned to review possible misconduct by federal law enforcement and intelligence officials during the counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign by Barr, who said in the spring that “some of the facts” surrounding the inquiry “don’t hang together with the official explanations of what happened.”
Following the DOJ watchdog’s FISA report, Barr said he told Durham to focus just as much on the FBI’s actions after Trump’s election in November 2016 as before it, including the period of spring 2017, when Mueller was appointed.
Barr predicted in December that “I see this, perhaps, reaching an important watershed perhaps in the late spring, early summer.”
Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe, a Republican member of the House judiciary and intelligence panels who was nominated to be Trump’s director of national intelligence, told Fox News he believes Durham is “specifically” looking into alleged FISA abuses, noting the DOJ already determined that at least two of the four FISA orders targeting Page were not valid.
Durham is reportedly reviewing former CIA Director John Brennan’s analysis of Russian election interference, including scrutiny of his handling of a secret source said to be close to the Kremlin. Some of the U.S. attorney’s scrutiny revolves around how the U.S. government eventually reached its January 2017 intelligence assessment on Russian election interference. Durham has already interviewed former National Security Agency director Adm. Mike Rogers.
The prosecutor is also focused on at least two clashes over sensitive information, according to sources cited by the New York Times, including an internal Obama administration squabble related to restrictions placed upon yet-unknown foreign intelligence by an unnamed intelligence agency and a fight over the White House preventing the FBI from viewing U.S. emails hacked by the Russians.
