DiGENOVA: JOHN BRENNAN PRIMARY FOCUS OF DURHAM PROBE
WND Staff
April 14, 2020
John Brennan in the Oval Office, Jan. 4, 2010. (Pete Souza, White House photographer)
Former CIA Director John Brennan is the primary focus of the Justice Department's criminal investigation of the origins of the Obama administration's Trump-Russia counter-intelligence probe, a former U.S. attorney confirmed Monday.
Joseph DiGenova said his sources close to the investigation say a number of former intelligence officers already have testified about the production of the famous January 2017 intelligence assessment on Russian intervention in the 2016 election.
DiGenova described the document as "phony."
"It was a constructed document," he told Boston talk-radio host Howie Carr. "It was not in fact an assessment of anything. And that is very interesting, because they are looking at what Brennan did and what he asked other people to do in terms of that and some other things as well. So apparently Mr. Durham has not been deterred by the virus."
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Durham previously was reported to be examing Brennan's handling of a secret source said to be close to the Kremlin and whether the CIA director was pushing for a biased result.
Carr said Durham is "clearly looking at abuse of power."
"In other words, were the resources of the CIA illegally used to undertake domestic terrorist investigations? Were the resources of the CIA used to illegally create a plot to either falsely lead FBI officials into a scheme or to conspire with FBI officials to deny certain people their civil rights," Carr said.
Hear the interview:
The Wall Street Journal previously reported Durham has been interviewing CIA officials at the National Intelligence Council, a center within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The council oversaw the collaboration between the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency in compiling and finalizing the 2017 assessment.
Troubling evidence
Last week, Attorney General William Barr said in an interview that Durham is compiling troubling evidence that goes beyond "mistakes."
"My own view is that the evidence shows that we're not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here, and we're going to get to the bottom of it," he said in an interview with the Fox News Channel's Laura Ingraham aired Thursday.
"And if people broke the law, and we can establish that with the evidence, they will be prosecuted," he said.
Last fall, Durham's review was upgraded to a criminal investigation, giving the prosecutor the power to impanel a grand jury and issue indictments.
"He is looking to bring to justice people who are engaged in abuses if he can show that they were criminal violations, and that's what the focus is on," Barr said of Durham.
The attorney general noted it takes time to build a case on events that went on for more than two years.
"So, he's diligently pursuing it," Barr said.
Durham likely will issue a report of his findings, he said.
Already, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has issued a report finding at least 17 "significant errors and omissions" related to the Obama administration's applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court for warrants to spy on the Trump campaign in its investigation.
Horowitz, however, presented evidence that the problems went beyond "errors and omissions," indicating deliberate attempts to deceive the court.
Barr told Ingrahan, "The people who abused FISA have a lot to answer for."
See William Barr's interview in Laura Ingraham:
'One of the greatest travesties in American history'
The Obama DOJ and FBI witheld excupatory information and used as primary evidence former British spy Christopher Steele's salacious and unverified dossier. The anti-Trump research, based on anonymous Russian sources, was funded by Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Horowitz found the FBI failed to disclose to the FISA court the fact that Steele's primary source of information disputed much of the dossier's contents.
"I think it's possible to put in a regime that would make it very hard either to willfully circumvent FISA or to do so sloppily without due regard for the rights of the American person involved and also to make it very clear that any misconduct will be discovered and discovered fairly promptly," Barr said in the Fox News interview. "So, I do think we can put in safeguards that will enable us to go forward with this important tool."
The only person known to be under criminal investigation by Durham is former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who altered a document in FISA warrant filings. The document was an email that said Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, the target of the FISA warrants, was an FBI source, which would exonerate him. But Clinesmith changed the wording of the email to say Page was "not a source."
Durham also is believed to be reviewing allegations that former CIA Director John Brennan pushed for a biased result in the January 2017 intelligence assessment that concluded Russia was interfering in the 2016 election.
"I think the president has every right to be frustrated, because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history," Barr told Ingraham.
"Without any basis, they started this investigation of his campaign, and even more concerning, actually is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president to sabotage his presidency — or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency."
Barr affirmed Trump's decision to fire Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who handled the Ukraine whistleblower complaint that led to the Democrats' partisan impeachment of the president.
"From the vantage point of the Department of Justice, he had interpreted his statute, which is a fairly narrow statute, that gave him jurisdiction over wrongdoing by intelligence people, and tried to turn it into a commission to explore anything in the government and immediately reported to Congress without letting the Executive Branch look at it and determine whether there was any problem,” Barr said.
"So, I think the president was correct in firing him."