Special counsel John Durham testified before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday, June 21, about what’s been known as his investigation into the investigators. Durham looked into the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation which examined the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. His team determined it was “seriously flawed” and that there was not adequate evidence to open the probe in the first place.
One of the hearing’s biggest revelations came when Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, asked Durham about the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and where it started.
Durham confirmed to Jordan that the U.S. government received intelligence in the summer of 2016 that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent at the time, approved a plan to tie Trump to Russia.
Durham also said then-CIA Director John Brennan thought the information was important enough that he briefed President Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director James Comey. But Brennan did not share the information with the agents working the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
“Didn’t share with the agents on the case,” Jordan said. “Can you tell the committee what happened when you took that referral memo and shared it with one of those agents, specifically supervisory special agent number one?”
“We interviewed the first supervisor, the crossfire investigation, the operational person. We showed him the intelligence information. He indicated he had never seen it before,” Durham explained. “He immediately became emotional and got up and left the room with his lawyer, spent some time in the hallway, came back…”
“He was ticked off, wasn’t he? He was ticked off because this is something he should have had as an agent on the case is important information that the director of the FBI kept from the people doing the investigation.”
“The information was kept from him,” Durham responded.
Durham’s investigation ended with one conviction. The final report did not make any accusations of political bias, but it did say there was confirmation bias.
