Attorney General William Barr confirmed that U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation of the Trump-Russia investigators includes a deep dive into the 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian interference during the last presidential election.
Barr, who picked the well-respected Connecticut federal prosecutor to be his right-hand man in examining the origins of the FBI’s Russia investigation, shed new light on the inquiry during an interview with the New York Times that was published on Monday.
“There was definitely Russian, uh, interference,” Barr said. “I think Durham is looking at the intelligence community’s ICA — the report that they did in December [2016]. And he’s sort of examining all the information that was based on, the basis for their conclusions. So to that extent, I still have an open mind, depending on what he finds.”
The early January 2017 assessment by the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency concluded with “high confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016”; that Russia worked to “undermine public faith” in U.S. democracy, to “denigrate” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and to “harm her electability and potential presidency”; and that Putin “developed a clear preference” for President Trump. The NSA diverged on one aspect, expressing only “moderate confidence” that Putin actively tried to help Trump win and to help Clinton lose.
“I wouldn’t call it a discrepancy. I’d call it an honest difference of opinion between three different organizations,” former NSA chief Mike Rogers told the Senate in 2017. “It didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources.”
Durham has interviewed Rogers and is looking into whether former CIA Director John Brennan took politicized actions to pressure the rest of the intelligence community to match his conclusions about Putin’s motivations. The prosecutor is also reportedly reviewing Brennan’s handling of a secret source said to be close to the Kremlin, and Durham wants to know what role that person’s information played in the assessment.
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report in April defending the intelligence community assessment, saying that Senate investigators found no evidence of political pressure to reach a specific conclusion and determining that the assessments by the CIA, FBI, and NSA present “a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
The committee looked at different intelligence disciplines, open-source reporting on the Kremlin’s policy preferences, and the content of Russian state-run media, all of which “showed that Moscow sought to denigrate” Clinton. The senators found that the intelligence community assessment drew on Russian leadership commentary, Kremlin media reports, and “specific intelligence reporting” to support its conclusion that “Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for” Trump.
Those findings clash with a 2018 report from the House Intelligence Committee, led at the time by Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican. That assessment, which was not bipartisan, concluded that “the majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments on Russia’s election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft” but found the “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not.”
Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
Durham is also reportedly scrutinizing Brennan in relation to British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier. In particular, the prosecutor is looking for answers concerning whether it was used in the 2017 assessment, why then-FBI Director James Comey and then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe insisted on it being part of the assessment, how allegations from the dossier ended up in the assessment’s appendix, and whether Brennan misled about the dossier’s use.
The New York Times reported that, according to Barr, “the possibility that the Russian government intentionally seeded the dossier with misinformation was one of the issues Mueller ignored and Durham was looking at.” Barr also felt Mueller had not “gone back and looked at the investigative steps taken as Crossfire Hurricane accelerated.”
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December report criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page in 2016 and 2017 and for the bureau’s reliance on Steele’s dossier. Steele worked at the behest of opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was funded by Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm. Recently declassified footnotes showed the FBI was aware that Steele’s dossier may have been compromised by Russian disinformation and still used it.
Durham is additionally examining whether the Crossfire Hurricane inquiry was properly predicated, an issue about which Barr and Durham disagreed with Horowitz, and is looking into the unmasking controversy, classified leaks such as those in early 2017 that centered on retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s calls with a Russian ambassador, and more.
Barr has said that he does not expect former President Barack Obama or former Vice President Joe Biden to be criminally investigated, saying that “there’s a difference between an abuse of power and a federal crime” and that “our concern over potential criminality is focused on others.”
