House Judiciary Republicans requested congressional testimony from Special Counsel John Durham, whose investigative report on the FBI’s 2016-2017 probe into the Trump campaign was published on Monday.
“We’ve reached out to the Justice Department to have Special Counsel John Durham testify next week,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote in a statement on Twitter on Monday.
Jordan indicated in a Monday letter (pdf) published on Twitter that the hearing would occur on May 25. He asked Durham to summarize his findings in a ten-minute opening statement and answer questions from committee members.
The judiciary committee’s request came as the Department of Justice (DOJ) published the much-anticipated Durham report (pdf), concluding the Special Counsel’s three-year-long investigation into the FBI’s conduct—and alleged misconduct—in investigating the Trump campaign from July 2016 to May 2017.
According to the Durham report, the FBI’s rush to open the investigation and the shoddy foundations used as the premise for the probe were a departure from how the agency treated other politically sensitive investigations in 2016.
One example of this was the FBI’s handling of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server to transmit top-secret government emails, the report indicated. It noted that the FBI and Justice Department restricted an inquiry into the Clinton Foundation so that little to no investigative activity could occur in the months leading up to the election.
But the agency had a different attitude towards Trump, Durham concluded, as evident by his observation that “neither U.S. nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.” Crossfire Hurricane was the codename for the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign.
Agents “repeatedly disregarded important requirements” when they made surveillance requests on the Trump campaign—initiated under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—in the absence of a “genuine belief” that there was a probable cause to investigate the target, the report found.
By Gary Bai
