Former Trump lawyer John Dowd claimed the White House was misled by special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
On Thursday, Dowd told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade on Fox News Radio that Mueller “badly misled” President Trump’s legal team as the special prosecutor investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“I don’t want to put words in your mouth. You feel like you were misled on where this probe was going. What do you think now that the scope memo is out there?” Kilmeade asked.
“In the last few days, I have been going back through my files, and we were badly misled by Mueller and his senior people, particularly in the meetings that we had,” Dowd said in response.
“There’s no question it’s a fraud … I think the whole report is just nonsense, and it’s staggering that the so-called ‘Dream Team’ would put on such a fraud. I mean, Durham has really got a load on his hands,” he later said.
On Thursday, the House Intelligence Committee released thousands of pages of transcripts from its closed-off interviews from 2017-2018 pertaining to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The released documents show James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration, admitting to the congressional committee that there was no direct evidence the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign entity to influence the election.
“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election,” Clapper said. “That’s not to say that there weren’t concerns about the evidence we were seeing, anecdotal evidence. … But I do not recall any instance where I had direct evidence of the content of these meetings. It’s just the frequency and prevalence of them was of concern.”
In April 2019, Mueller released his long-awaited report on Russian interference and could not find evidence of criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, though it did find substantial evidence that Russian actors actively attempted to influence the election.
U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General William Barr, is currently investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.
