President Trump reportedly urged the Australian prime minister to help Attorney General William Barr with an investigation that he hopes will discredit former special counsel Robert Mueller’s 18-month probe.
The conversation with Prime Minister Scott Morrison came during a recent phone call, a restricted transcript of which only a few close aides were privy to, according to the New York Times.
The phone call, which according to one source was at the behest of Barr, intended to ask for Australia’s help with the Justice Department’s inquiry into the Russian collusion investigation, which ended without any evidence that Trump conspired with Russia.
“The Australian government has always been ready to assist and cooperate with efforts that help shed further light on matters under investigation,” the Australian government said in a statement on Monday. “The PM confirmed this readiness once again in conversation with the President.”
News of the phone call to Morrison comes amid scrutiny over another phone call that Trump had on July 25 with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That phone call ended up being a central tenet of an August whistleblower complaint against Trump.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry into Trump, after which the transcript of the phone call was released. The whistleblower complaint was also released last week. The call and complaint have prompted some Democrats who previously didn’t support impeachment to now support it, although Trump claims the call and complaint clear him of any wrongdoing.
Trump suggested in the call that Ukraine should investigate Biden and his son Hunter, who was on the board of a company owned by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky. Zlochevsky was being investigated by top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, though it is in dispute how serious that investigation was. Trump also suggested that Ukraine should look into issues surrounding the alleged involvement of some Ukrainians in 2016 presidential election interference.
Biden boasted in 2018 that, as vice president, he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if Ukraine didn’t fire Shokin, which Trump’s allies have said was because of the investigation. Democrats have said such was part of a U.S. and European effort to oust Shokin as ineffective and a hindrance to Ukraine’s anti-corruption investigations. Ukraine removed Shokin in 2016.
The DOJ has also made it clear that Trump never told Barr to contact Ukraine about any investigation of Biden, nor did Barr ever discuss these issues with Ukraine or with Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani.
Last week, the Justice Department revealed that U.S. Attorney John Durham, picked by Attorney General William Barr to look into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, is investigating whether Ukraine and a variety of other countries were involved in any 2016 election efforts.
“A Department of Justice team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is separately exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election,” DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said last Wednesday. “While the Attorney General has yet to contact Ukraine in connection with this investigation, certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government have volunteered information to Mr. Durham, which he is evaluating.”
The DOJ denied that Barr or Durham had been working with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in any Ukraine-related efforts.
The Trump administration’s interest in records potentially in Australia’s possession likely stems from the fact that information from Australian diplomat Alexander Downer about Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos was used to justify the launch of the Trump-Russia investigation in the summer of 2016.
On May 10, 2016, while at Kensington Wine Rooms in London, Papadopolous allegedly told Downer that he’d been told by the mysterious Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud that Russia was in possession of damaging information on then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s, believed to be her emails. Downer passed this information along to the U.S. government a couple months later, and it is alleged that this meeting is what led to the launch of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016.
“To this day, I don’t remember actually ever sharing that information with this person that I guess triggered this whole investigation,” Papadopolous testified to Congress in October 2018. “But like I said, I remember many other facets of that meeting.”
The Mueller report confirmed the important role that the information from Downer played in the official launching of the FBI’s Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation. The probe, dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane”, was launched on July 31, 2016, just after Wikileaks began releasing emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. The impetus for the opening of the inquiry was when “a foreign government” — namely Australia — contacted the FBI about Downer’s interactions with Papadopoulos. Mueller wrote that Australia’s information prompted the FBI “to open an investigation into whether individuals associated with the Trump campaign were coordinating with the Russian government in its interference activities.” Mueller ultimately “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between the Kremlin and anyone associated with Trump.
Mueller’s report only went as far as to say Mifsud “had connections to Russia” and “maintained various Russian contacts,” including a with a former employee of the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm that investigators said carried out a social media disinformation campaign to sow discord in the 2016 election. As part of Mueller’s Russia investigation, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October 2017 to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with Mifsud and served 12 days in prison late last year.
Mifsud has denied that he told Papadopoulos the Russians had Clinton’s emails, and Mifsud’s attorney, Stephan Roh, claims his client has cooperated with Western intelligence, not Russian intelligence, aligning with what some GOP investigators, such as Republican congressman Devin Nunes, have said. Roh also said Durham was seeking an interview with Mifsud.
Durham has been Barr’s right hand as the two look into the complicated and classified issues surrounding how an investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties with Russia got its start, though the U.S. attorney from Connecticut has been virtually silent since his selection.
Trump gave Barr “full and complete authority to declassify information” related to the origins of the Trump-Russia probe in May after Barr had infuriated Democrats when he said “spying did occur” on the Trump campaign and refused to backtrack. Republicans have alleged that foreign intelligence agencies, like those in western Europe, may have played a role in eavesdropping on or otherwise monitoring Trump campaign associates in 2016.
Durham’s investigation is separate from the one that was just finished by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. The DOJ watchdog investigated allegations of abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by the DOJ and FBI, and Horowitz has spoken with Durham, who is handling any criminal referrals from Horowitz’s investigation.
The Washington Examiner reached out the White House, the Justice Department, and the Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet but did not immediately receive a response.
