Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said the work of special counsel John Durham is taking a strange turn.
He replied in the affirmative on Thursday when CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer asked whether a recent grand jury indictment against a cybersecurity lawyer accused of lying to the FBI and a fresh subpoena against a law firm with close ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign shows the prosecutor found “essentially not much” so far in his inquiry into the origins and conduct of the Russia investigation.
“There’s really very little here relevant to what he supposedly was hired to investigate,” McCabe added. “He’s getting pretty far afield from the FBI. In fact, the recent indictment and these subpoenas really hold the FBI more in the position of victim rather than subject of an investigation. So it’s a bizarre turn of events, and it’s one that I’m sure is disappointing a lot of Republicans.”
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Durham began his review while serving as a U.S. attorney following an appointment by former Attorney General William Barr. Although Durham left his role as U.S. attorney, the Biden administration let the inquiry continue after Barr appointed him special counsel in October.
The endeavor has long been criticized by Democrats and legal observers, who claim the inquiry is meant to undercut special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged ties between the Trump 2016 campaign and Russia. Former President Donald Trump and his allies have championed it as a means to rid corrupt officials, including in the FBI, out to settle political scores.
McCabe, who was fired from the FBI in 2018 and now has a job at CNN, said in 2019 he was the one who ordered an obstruction of justice inquiry into Trump after the firing of FBI Director James Comey to ensure the Russia investigation would not “vanish in the night without a trace.” He also told FBI investigators that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein sought Comey’s advice on appointing a special counsel — who ended up being Mueller — after playing a role in his firing.
Mueller’s team concluded Russia interfered “in a sweeping and systematic fashion” during the 2016 presidential election, but it “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. However, his report described 10 instances of possible obstruction of justice that Democrats seized on as a road map to impeachment. The investigation also led to several convictions and guilty pleas from Trump’s associates over charges unrelated to collusion with Russia.
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So far, Durham has obtained only a single guilty plea from former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who admitted to altering an email about a Trump campaign aide under government surveillance.
The indictment that came this month focuses on Michael Sussmann, a former attorney at Perkins Coie who is accused of falsely telling the top FBI lawyer he was not representing any clients when acting on behalf of a technology executive and the Clinton campaign during a September 2016 meeting on possible links between Trump and Russia. Sussmann pleaded not guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI, with lawyers insisting he never said he didn’t have clients and was representing only the technology executive at the meeting five years ago.
Allies of Trump say the 27-page indictment provides a great deal of evidence showing a broad conspiracy orchestrated by the Clinton team.
Recent reports suggested Durham was considering criminal prosecutions of lower-level FBI agents and others as he investigates information provided to the FBI in 2016 that spurred on the Trump-Russia investigation.
