Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
As the investigation into the investigators heats up, information is being released about the focus of Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham’s probe into the origins of the Russia collusion counterintelligence operation during the 2016 campaign.
Durham sent a letter Monday to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) in response to questions he had about the scope of his probe. “The letter could indicate that the DOJ is looking closely at work done during the campaign by Fusion GPS, the firm retained by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee (DNC) to conduct opposition research against the Trump campaign,” Fox News reported.
Dossier author Christopher Steele is negotiating a meeting with Durham, and Attorney General William Barr has reportedly stayed inc lose contact with Durham as he begins his investigation.
There are several examples of possible foreign influence in the Russia collusion probe, many of which were alleged in the Steele dossier and later found by Mueller to be lacking in supporting evidence. Durham would appear to be examining how and why those instances were included in Steele’s dossier, which was then used to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Trump associate Carter Page.
“The deeper the dive we take into the Mueller report, we’re starting to find out some of the conclusions, and actually some of the facts they put forth in there, are a misrepresentation of what we actually know,” North Carolina GOP Rep. Mark Meadows told Fox News Sunday.
Meadows also said some of the key players in the Russian collusion investigation may have known some of the information used in the FISA report taken from Steele’s dossier was actually bad information.
[Meadows] has seen “additional documents” that demonstrate that “prior to the first FISA application, Peter Strzok, Andy McCabe, and others at the FBI knew that Christopher Steele’s dossier was not credible.” Internal FBI text messages obtained by Fox News in March showed FBI brass scrambling to respond to a concern from a senior DOJ official about the potential “bias” of a key FISA source.
Meadows, speaking to “Fox News Sunday,” pointed specifically to a report from The Hill’s John Solomon, who found that Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, a key figure in Mueller’s report, was actually a U.S. informant. In his report, Mueller linked Kilimnik to Russian intelligence, and did not mention Kilimnik’s secretive ties to the U.S. in the report other court filings — even as Mueller suggested former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s ties to Kilimnik were nefarious.
The FBI called Page an “agent of a foreign power” in its October 2016 FISA application, and it would appear that Durham is trying to suss out, once and for all, the truth or falsity of that allegation.
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