The House Judiciary Committee will hear public testimony from former special counsel John Durham about his probe into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation on June 21, two sources familiar with the committee’s plans told NBC news.
Durham was charged by former U.S. Attorney General William Barr with leading a probe into the FBI and Justice Department’s handling of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election —an investigation Barr had been highly critical of.
Durham completed his four-year investigation and filed a lengthy final report earlier this month that concluded the FBI inappropriately launched a full investigation into the allegations, but stopped short of providing any new evidence that anyone in the government had broken the law.
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“The [Justice] Department and the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to law,” Durham’s report said. “Senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor toward the information they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons or entities.”
The Justice Department’s inspector general, however, found in 2019 that despite a series of mistakes by the FBI, the decision to open the probe was justified and not tainted by political bias or improper motivation.
In response to Durham’s report, the FBI said it had already addressed the missteps he had identified.
“The conduct in 2016 and 2017 that Special Counsel Durham examined was the reason that current FBI leadership already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time,” it said in a statement.
Over the course of his investigation, Durham elicited one guilty plea that led to probation charge, but also fell short of convicting defendants in two trials.
Republicans, including Judiciary chair Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, have used Durham’s report to make the case that the probe into Russia and its ties to then-candidate Donald Trump were politically motivated and based on a faulty premise.
Fox News reported last week that Jordan planned to call Durham to testify before the committee.
House Democrats have charged that the Durham report itself is politically motivated. Durham “is the number one example of the weaponization of the federal government,” Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., told MSNBC last week.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
