Special counsel John Durham has “one of the most important jobs” in the United States and hopefully will “fully expose” the wrongdoing committed during the federal investigations into allegations of Russian collusion, former President Donald Trump said in a new interview.
Kash Patel, an intelligence and defense official in the Trump administration, asked his former boss to share his views on Durham’s inquiry into the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation during a conversation on Kash’s Corner for the Epoch Times.
Trump lamented how he wishes the investigation had moved “faster,” adding, “It would’ve been nice to have been done before the election” because “what they did was so criminal, and it would’ve been good if the voters had known that.” Still, Trump said he doesn’t think the lack of a report was a “big defining moment” for the 2020 contest in which he lost to President Joe Biden.
Republicans pushed for Durham to release an interim report before the 2020 election, and Trump had repeatedly voiced his frustration, but no such interim report has emerged more than a year after Trump left office. However, there have been prosecutions.
“He did come up with some really interesting stuff with the lawyers and Sussmann and all of these people, number one, and I hear there’s a lot coming, so I think the jury is out,” Trump said of Durham. “We’re going to see what happens, but what he’s doing is one of the most important jobs being done right now in America.”
Igor Danchenko, a U.S.-based and Russian-born researcher and the main source for Christopher Steele’s discredited anti-Trump dossier, was charged by Durham last year with five counts of making false statements to the FBI. Durham’s indictment said Danchenko made these statements about the information he provided to Steele for his dossier, which the FBI relied upon when pursuing authority for the flawed secret surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty.
Michael Sussmann, a Democratic lawyer, was also indicted on a charge of allegedly lying to an FBI official in 2016 while pushing discredited claims of secret communications between a Russian bank and the Trump Organization. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty. Durham’s team contended in a 2021 indictment that, when Sussmann was pushing the Alfa Bank claims to the FBI in September 2016, he told the bureau’s general counsel at the time, James Baker, that he was not working for any particular client but that he was in fact secretly doing the bidding of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and billing his services to her — as well as working on behalf of technology executive Rodney Joffe.
Clinton tweeted on Halloween 2016 that “computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.” She shared a statement from her campaign foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, now Biden’s national security adviser, who said, “The secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia.” Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in 2019 that “the FBI investigated whether there were cyber links between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, but had concluded by early February 2017 that there were no such links.”
There is also ex-FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to editing an email fraudulently to say former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was “not a source” for the CIA. In addition, Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer who represented the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee and lined up the funding for funding Steele’s dossier, gave grand jury testimony as part of Durham’s investigation.
ELIAS TESTIFIED BEFORE DURHAM’S GRAND JURY
Patel pressed Trump on whether he has faith in the Durham investigation.
“He came out with that initial statement and report, and it was big, and that felt like a foundation for very big things to come,” Trump said. “So hopefully, I mean, who knows? We’re going to see.”
Horowitz released a report in December 2019 that criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants and for the bureau’s reliance on Steele’s discredited dossier. Horowitz found that the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation had “sufficient factual predication.” Durham broke with Horowitz, saying in 2019 that “we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”
Trump also said, “It is really the crime of the century. And it changed everything, including the election. … And all of the things they said about me and Russia, it was them and Russia. … They worked with Russia.”
Robert Mueller’s special counsel team released a 2019 report that said investigators “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign” but “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Steele was working for Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, before, during, and after his time targeting Trump, and the former MI6 agent was hired to put the dossier together by an opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, which was simultaneously working for Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya of the now-infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. The Clinton campaign hired Fusion GPS. Danchenko allegedly relied upon a network of Russian contacts, undermined key collusion claims when interviewed by the FBI, and had previously been investigated as a possible threat to national security due to potential Russian intelligence contacts.
According to Durham, Danchenko anonymously sourced at least one claim about Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to longtime Clinton ally Chuck Dolan, who spent many years, including 2016, doing work for Russian businesses and the Russian government. The fabricated claim from Dolan about Manafort made it into the dossier via Danchenko.
Then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified handwritten notes from former CIA Director John Brennan in October 2020 showing that Brennan briefed then-President Barack Obama in 2016 on an unverified Russian intelligence report claiming that Clinton planned in July 2016 on tying Trump to Russia’s hack of the DNC to distract from her improper use of a private email server.
During his interview with Patel, Trump also vented about House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff.
“I’d watch him go up to the microphone and act as though, so hurt, he’s so hurt, talking about Trump and Russia, when he knew it was a rigged deal, when he knew it was a fake,” Trump said. “He knew it was fake. He was one of the people that made it up, along with Hillary Clinton and others.”
Schiff, a California Democrat, claimed in 2017 that he had seen “more than circumstantial evidence” that Trump associates colluded with Russia, and he read portions of the Steele dossier into the congressional record. Schiff claimed repeatedly that there was “evidence” of collusion “in plain sight.”
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“I hope John Durham, for the good of the country, comes up with everything that you know took place and that everybody knows took place,” Trump said. “Because it has been exposed — it would be really nice to have it fully exposed.”
