U.S. Attorney John Durham’s team of investigators is stacked with veteran prosecutors and former FBI agents carrying out their mission “full throttle” as anticipation builds following recent revelations about Crossfire Hurricane.
Durham, selected by Attorney General William Barr last year to carry out an inquiry into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation and conduct of U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies, has added additional members to his team, which is “going full throttle” and “looking at everything,” according to sources cited by Fox News. One of the sources said the Justice Department added investigators and “farmed out” part of the investigation “because it is too much for Durham, and he didn’t want to be distracted.”
Jeffrey Jensen, the U.S. attorney for Eastern Missouri selected by Barr in February to review the case against retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and whose efforts unearthed a trove of concealed documents, has reportedly been asked to continue helping with Durham’s inquiry following the Justice Department’s move last week to drop the criminal charges against the former Trump national security adviser. Jensen was an FBI special agent from 1989 to 1999 and, after that, became an assistant U.S. attorney for 10 years.
The federal prosecutor who filed the motion to drop the false statement charges against Flynn last week was Timothy Shea, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. Shea was tapped for the key prosecutorial role in the nation’s capital earlier this year and is reportedly aiding Durham with elements of the so-called “investigation of the investigators.” Shea took over as D.C.’s top prosecutor after serving as counsel to Barr. He also spent years as an assistant U.S. attorney in D.C.
Barr was asked about the Durham inquiry by CBS News’s Catherine Herridge last Thursday.
“Well, as you know, I’m not gonna predict the outcome,” Barr said. “But I said that we’re certainly — there probably will be a report as a byproduct of his work. But we also are seeing if there are people who violated the law and should be brought to justice. And that’s what we have our eye on.”
Durham’s team recently added the chief of the Violent Crimes and Narcotics Trafficking Section for the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., Anthony Scarpelli, according to sources cited by CNN in late April. Scarpelli has spent the last two years leading the office in charge of the fight against murder and the drug trade. Before that, he was the deputy chief of that office, according to his LinkedIn profile. Scarpelli also spent a year as an assistant U.S. attorney in the U.S. Virgin Islands, 14 years as an assistant U.S. attorney in D.C., and eight years as an assistant prosecutor for Middlesex County in New Jersey.
The New York Times revealed more of Durham’s deep roster in a report late last month.
Nora Dannehy, a veteran prosecutor, was brought back to Durham’s Connecticut office in March 2019 and has been helping with the Russia origins investigation. She has the distinction of being the first female U.S. attorney for Connecticut, holding the top spot from 2008 to 2010. During her time as a prosecutor in Connecticut, she helped send a state treasurer and a governor to prison for political corruption. And she has worked on sensitive investigations before, being tapped by then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey in 2006 to investigate whether there was improper political motivation behind the dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006.
Another longtime assistant U.S. attorney in Connecticut, Neeraj Patel, has also been tapped to assist Durham. Over the course of a decade in that role, Patel has helped put child pornographers, sexual predators, men who made bomb threats, and other violent criminals behind bars.
Andrew DeFilippis, an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan, is another official roped into Durham’s effort. The longtime prosecutor is known for his high-profile terrorism prosecutions, including securing the conviction of Ahmad Khan Rahimi, whose 2016 Chelsea neighborhood bombing injured 30 people, and going after Ahmed Mohammed El Gammal for recruiting a New York college student to travel to eventually die in Syria fighting for the Islamic State.
Durham’s investigative team also includes at least two FBI veterans.
One of the former bureau members, Timothy Fuhrman, spent 29 years as a special agent at the FBI, with high-profile investigations at offices in Utah and Alabama, including a case involving the poisoning of a Border Agent with ricin in 2008 and a federal hate crimes case involving the beating of a black man outside a Walmart in 2009. Fuhrman was also involved with 2006’s successful hunt for the FBI’s Most Wanted List fugitive, polygamist, and child sex predator Warren Jeffs, who has since been sentenced to life in prison. Fuhrman’s LinkedIn currently lists him as being the chief investigator at the Alabama Attorney General’s Office since 2011.
Jack Eckenrode, a longtime FBI special agent, has also been working on Durham’s team since last year. The two first worked together in the early 2000s when Durham was an assistant U.S. attorney in Connecticut, and Eckenrode was the assistant special agent in charge there before he moved to Boston and later ran the Philadelphia office. Eckenrode assisted Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, in Fitzpatrick’s special counsel investigation related to CIA leaks and the Valerie Plame controversy.
Eckenrode praised former FBI Director James Comey after his firing and won praise from former FBI agent and current liberal commentator Asha Rangappa, who said of her friend and mentor that “Jack is as straight a shooter as you can get in the FBI … It’s the first reassuring thing I’ve heard about this review.”
Democrats have criticized Durham’s inquiry, which reportedly was upgraded into a criminal investigation last year, as a politically motivated scheme to undermine the work of special counsel Robert Mueller and attack Trump’s perceived enemies. Republican allies of the president have championed Durham’s investigation and called for top officials, including Comey, to face accountability for an alleged effort to undermine the president.
Durham himself is widely regarded as a fair and dogged prosecutor, famously leading the prosecution of mobsters, including a series of high-profile convictions of the notorious New England Mafia. His corruption investigation of former Republican Connecticut Governor John Rowland resulted in Rowland finding himself behind bars following a guilty plea.
The Connecticut prosecutor was appointed by then-Attorney General Janet Reno in 1999 to investigate the corrupt connections between law enforcement officers in Boston with James “Whitey” Bulger and other associates of the Irish mob’s Winter Hill Gang. His inquiry ended with the convictions of former FBI Supervisory Special Agent John Connolly and former Massachusetts State Police Lt. Richard Schneiderhan.
In 2008, Durham took on a sensitive and controversial investigation into the actions taken by members of the U.S. government when Mukasey appointed him special prosecutor to look into the CIA’s destruction of tapes of detainee interrogations. Durham was then selected by Attorney General Eric Holder to conduct a broader investigation into the CIA’s so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. Durham did not recommend criminal charges, but his report is still largely secret.
