Attorney General William Barr defended asking other countries for help looking into the launch of the Trump-Russia investigation led by U.S. Attorney John Durham.
“Some of the countries that John Durham thought might have some information that would be helpful to the investigation wanted preliminarily to talk to me about the scope of the investigation, the nature of the investigation, and how I intended to handle confidential information, and so forth,” Barr said to Fox News. “So I initially discussed these matters with those countries and introduced them to John Durham and established a channel by which Mr. Durham can obtain assistance from those countries.”
The DOJ has distanced itself from the actions of President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, whose Ukraine foray is a central focus of the House Democrats’ impeachment proceedings and whose associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested in New York. But DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said the department was exploring the extent to which “a number of countries” played a role in the Trump-Russia investigation, and Barr and Durham reached out to the United Kingdom and Australia and flew to Italy to meet with Italian intelligence officials.
Barr has come under fire in recent weeks as Democrats claimed his actions — including seeking information from foreign countries — seem like those of Trump’s personal attorney rather than the attorney general.
“That’s completely wrong, and there is no basis for it,” Barr said. “I act on behalf of the United States.”
Calling his right-hand man “thorough and fair,” Barr said Durham is in charge of the investigation and will be honest in any assessment of possible wrongdoing.
Durham has opened a criminal investigation as part of his review, which could empower him to impanel grand juries and hand down indictments. Durham’s investigative portfolio recently expanded to include events from the launch of the inquiry in 2015 or 2016 through the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller in 2017.
Australian diplomat Alexander Downer tipped off the bureau that Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos told him the Russians had damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos was allegedly told about this Russian “dirt” by the mysterious Rome-based Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud, whom Mueller said had ties to the Russian government, but whom some Republicans claim had ties to Italian intelligence, although Italy’s prime minister denied that last week.
Downer says he was prompted to tell the FBI about his conversation with Papadopoulos by Wikileaks’ release of Democratic National Committee emails. British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s salacious and unverified dossier was used extensively by the FBI and DOJ in applications with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain wiretaps against Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
