Tough questions for special counsel
WASHINGTON — The special counsel who investigated the FBI’s probe of ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign found himself at the center of a heated political fight as he appeared before a congressional committee Wednesday, with Democrats denouncing his inquiry and Republicans arguing that its findings helped prove an anti-Trump bias within law enforcement.
John Durham, the Justice Department special counsel who recently completed his report, testified before the House Judiciary Committee in a hearing that unfolded against the backdrop of a 37-count indictment of Trump on charges he illegally retained classified documents.
Despite roughly six hours of testimony, the hearing broke little new ground. Under questioning from Republicans, he repeated many of the strongest findings of condemnation in his 306-page report and also faced criticism from Democrats over a four-year investigation that produced just one conviction and fell short of Trump’s claims that it would expose “the crime of the century.”
The hearing spotlighted well-established law enforcement errors during the yearsold Trump-Russia investigation, but Durham’s appearance took on more contemporary political resonance in light of the criminal case against Trump and efforts by the former president and some Republican allies to undermine public confidence in the FBI.
“They’re never going to stop. Seven years of attacking Trump is scary enough, but what’s more frightening, any one of us could be next,” said the committee chairman, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio.
Representative Wesley Hunt, Republican of Texas, said Americans believe there’s a “twotiered system of justice” that, he said, was “terrifying.”
“Here we are seven years later, still talking about President Trump and this Democrat-invented scandal,” Hunt said.
Democrats, for their part, went after Durham and his investigation in personal terms — Representative Ted Lieu of California derided him for behaving like a “partisan hack.”
They accused Republicans of using Durham’s appearance as a pretext to criticize the FBI for its continued scrutiny of Trump and to distract from the former president’s current legal troubles.
“That’s why you’re here today, not because of anything that happened in 2016,” New York Representative Jerrold Nadler, the top Democrat on the committee, told Durham.
Durham, who was appointed by then-Attorney General William Barr to review the origins of Trump-Russia investigation, tried to keep the focus of the hearing on his findings.
He noted that his review found that FBI investigators examining potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia ignored exculpatory evidence, used a largely discredited dossier of opposition research to obtain a surveillance warrant on a former Trump campaign aide, withheld key information from judges, and lacked an adequate basis to open a full investigation in the first place.
He said the errors in the investigation were notable because the inquiry was not a “run-of-the-mill investigation” but instead concerned a “presidential campaign.”
He said current and former FBI agents had personally apologized to him for the way the Russia investigation was conducted.
Democrats repeatedly steered the hearing back to Durham’s track record, the abrupt and publicly unexplained departure of his top deputy, and the fact that many of his more damning findings were already revealed years earlier in a Justice Department inspector general report. His investigation yielded just one guilty plea from a little-known FBI lawyer, a case referred to his office by the inspector general. And the two cases that Durham’s team took to trial ended in swift jury acquittals.
GOP animosity toward the Justice Department was further fueled by Tuesday’s announcement that President Biden’s son Hunter will likely avoid jail time in a plea deal on tax and gun allegations. Jordan tweeted that it was a “DOUBLE STANDARD OF JUSTICE.”