President Trump suggested that the findings in U.S. Attorney John Durham’s criminal inquiry into the Russia investigation could be more troubling than what is publicly known.
The commander in chief clued in a prime-time audience on Thursday when host Sean Hannity asked him to react to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, saying over the weekend he expects criminal indictments and newly declassified FBI documents.
“It’s just more and more things that you see. And that’s only what you see. It is really bad,” Trump said. “It is a terrible thing that happened. It should never happen to another president.”
The FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation in the summer of 2016, looking into whether there was coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in an effort to interfere in the election. That inquiry got folded in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, which concluded that Russia interfered in 2016 in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
Trump and his allies insist the Obama administration devised a scheme and improperly “spied” on his 2016 campaign using the U.S. intelligence apparatus and have pinned their hopes on Durham, the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut, to root out any misconduct. Trump told Hannity that former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden, who is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, “knew everything,” pointing to documents that have been declassified and released to the public in recent months.
The politically charged review, which shifted into a criminal investigation last fall, has been criticized by Democrats as a scheme to damage Trump’s rivals ahead of the 2020 election. However, Attorney General William Barr said in May that he does not expect there to be criminal investigations of Obama and Biden.
The attorney general did say earlier this summer that Durham has uncovered “very troubling” information and is investigating people whose names are familiar to the public. The Justice Department has signaled that it expects “developments” in Durham’s investigation by the end of the season.
Hannity also asked Trump if he is considering any pardons for people who got wrapped up in what became Mueller’s Russia investigation. The president recently commuted the prison sentence of his longtime confidant, Roger Stone, and the Justice Department is fighting in the courts to drop its case against retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.
“I’ve looked at a lot of different people, they have been treated extremely unfairly, and I think I probably would,” Trump said.
