Expect indictments in U.S. Attorney John Durham’s criminal inquiry into the Russia investigation by summer’s end.
That’s what K.T. McFarland, a onetime deputy to former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, said this week on Fox News, referring to the emergence of “cold hard evidence” in the form of documentation.
“Now, there is cold, hard evidence. It turns out that these senior officials in the intelligence community and the FBI, they all took notes. They all texted each other. They all had handwritten notes of meetings,” McFarland said on Monday. “And from what I’m hearing, the Durham investigation and the Justice Department is getting to the point where I think we can expect some indictments before the end of the summer.”
Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham more than a year ago to investigate misconduct by federal law enforcement and intelligence officials during the Russia investigation. The Justice Department has signaled that it expects “developments” in Durham’s investigation by the end of the summer.
The politically charged review, which shifted into a criminal investigation last fall, has been criticized by Democrats as a scheme to damage President Trump’s rivals ahead of the 2020 election and hailed by Republicans who claim the Russia investigation was a partisan hit job.
In recent months, there have been several document disclosures revealing secret deliberations among the investigators who were scrutinizing ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, including about the case against Flynn, which his legal team views as exculpatory evidence that was withheld.
Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to FBI investigators about his December 2016 conversations with a Russian envoy. After changing legal teams, Flynn claimed this year that he was set up by the FBI and moved to withdraw his guilty plea. The Justice Department said in early May that it would seek to drop the case, and the matter is still playing out in the courts.
McFarland, who served on Trump’s transition team and was interviewed by the FBI in the summer of 2017 as part of that inquiry, wondered aloud about the recent absence of key figures from the Russia investigation on the airwaves.
“If there are going to be indictments coming before Labor Day or before the end of the summer, my guess is the heat is turned up really high on some of those people,” she added.
