Justice Department disclosure offers rare sign of life from John Durham
The Biden administration offered a glimpse of activity from special counsel John Durham's inquiry into the Russia investigation on Friday.
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The Biden administration offered a glimpse of activity from special counsel John Durham's inquiry into the Russia investigation on Friday.
A week after former President Donald Trump asked, “Where’s John Durham? Is he a living, breathing human being? Will there ever be a Durham report?”, the Justice Department provided some records to American Oversight, a liberal watchdog group, through the Freedom of Information Act.
There isn't much to the disclosure, which is only several pages long and largely covered in redactions, but the redactions themselves on text and email correspondence over the past couple of years offered a clue about the status of Durham's work. The messages in the latest batch given to the watchdog group span through August, September, and October 2019. There are also text messages from Durham in January 2021 that are completely redacted.
"The new text messages we just obtained indicate that Durham’s investigation is still ongoing. In releasing them to us via FOIA, DOJ has asserted exemption (7(A)) — a provision of FOIA that allows them to withhold information in ongoing matters," American Oversight said.
This comes a couple of days after CNN reported Durham, who recently left his role as the U.S. attorney in Connecticut but was allowed to continue the investigation following his appointment as special counsel by former Attorney General William Barr, has been arranging witness interviews and issuing subpoenas in recent months.
One series of text messages that are partially visible in the records disclosure to American Oversight were those sent between Durham and Attorney General William Barr on Sept. 24, 2019.
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The group tweeted: "We obtained text messages that show the day before the transcript of Donald Trump’s July 2019 call with Ukrainian President Zelensky was released, former Attorney General Barr texted U.S. Attorney John Durham 'Call me ASAP.' 12 hours later, Durham asked for another 'quick call.'"
The Justice Department released a rare update on Durham's inquiry the next day.
“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,” then-DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said on Sept. 25, 2019. “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.”
In the call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, immediately after the Ukrainian president expressed interest in purchasing anti-tank weaponry, known as Javelins, from the United States, Trump asked Zelensky "to do us a favor though,” to look into CrowdStrike and any possible Ukrainian election interference in 2016. Trump urged Zelensky later in the call to investigate “the other thing,” referring to allegations of corruption related to Joe and Hunter Biden, telling Zelensky to speak with his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Barr.
A whistleblower complaint about the call led to Trump being impeached by the House on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in late 2019, but the president was acquitted following an early 2020 Senate trial.
Biden had his first call as president with Zelensky on Thursday amid rising tensions between Ukraine and Russia.
The FOIA disclosure on Friday also showed correspondence in 2019 between Barr and Seth Ducharme, a counselor to Barr who later was picked to be acting U.S. attorney for the Brooklyn-based Eastern District of New York.
The politically charged investigation run by Durham since the spring of 2019 has lasted longer than special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia inquiry. The federal prosecutor was tasked with investigating the origins and conduct of the FBI's inquiry into ties between Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia.
Barr quietly appointed Durham to be special counsel in October after first assigning him to the task in May 2019, providing him extra protections from a new administration seeking to cut short his work. Durham was “authorized to investigate whether any federal official, employee, or any other person or entity violated the law in connection with the intelligence, counterintelligence, or law enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns, individuals associated with those campaigns, and individuals associated with the administration of President Donald J. Trump” as special counsel.
Biden's attorney general, Merrick Garland, declined to promise during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he would protect Durham's investigation or make his eventual report public. However, Garland said he didn't currently have any reason to think it wasn't the right move to keep Durham from continuing his work.
Much to the chagrin of Trump and many of his allies, Durham has so far secured only one guilty plea.
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FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who has since left the bureau, admitted to Durham in the summer that he falsified a document during the bureau’s efforts to renew its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authority to wiretap former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, editing a CIA email in 2017 to state that Page was “not a source." Page denied any wrongdoing and was never charged with a crime. Clinesmith was sentenced to one year of probation and no prison time.
In a podcast interview last week with Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe, Trump asserted how he believed the Justice Department "didn't even have to appoint Durham."