Dozens of members of the U.S. Senate already have warned Attorney General Merrick Garland not to mess with the investigation of special counsel John Durham, who was tasked with finding the origins of the long-debunked Democrat conspiracy theory that falsely alleged President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign was compromised with “Russia collusion.”
Forty-six GOP senators recently wrote a letter to Garland insisting that he respect the independence of Durham’s work. They confirmed Durham is uncovering “highly concerning, and potentially criminal, manipulation and exploitation of federal law enforcement resources.”
According to a report at Just the News, 46 Republican senators, led by Rick Scott of Florida, wrote a letter to Garland to seek his “assurance” “that you will continue to respect the prosecutorial independence of Special Counsel John Durham and his staff, while also ensuring he is provided all resources necessary to fully, thoroughly, and completely pursue the investigation for which he was appointed.”
The letter followed by only days Durham’s motion in federal court linking Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer, Michael Sussman, and other campaign officials to a tech company that was hired to “mine” Trump data servers “for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”
That conspiracy theory by Democrats, highlighted by the infamous Steele dossier of unfounded claims against Trump, triggered an earlier special counsel investigation by former FBI chief Robert Mueller, who spent years looking into the evidence and found no support for the Russiagate claims.
The letter cited the evidence suggesting a plan to “target American citizens, including a presidential candidate, based upon fabricated evidence that had been procured and disseminated by individuals closely connected with a rival political campaign.”
Now a prominent government watchdog, Judicial Watch, has revealed a lawsuit seeking to find out whether Garland has, or has not, been giving Durham orders.
The organization confirmed on Thursday it has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for records of communication between Durham and Garland.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the DOJ failed to respond to an August 23, 2021, FOIA request for “all records of communication, including emails and text messages, between Special Counsel John Durham and Attorney General Merrick Garland.”
The case also seeks information about Durham’s budget.
Explained Judicial Watch, “Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley raised concerns last year about whether the Justice Department was in potential conflict with the Durham investigation because a senior Justice official, Susan Hennessey, had previously made statements attacking the Durham Investigation.”
The announcement said Hennessey had “expressed a clear partisan bias against the Special Counsel’s investigation” and on social media had claimed, “Durham has made abundantly clear that in a year and a half, he hasn’t come up with anything. I guess this kind of partisan silliness has become characteristic of [former Attorney General Bill] Barr’s legacy, but unclear to me why Durham would want to go along with it.”
Durham’s investigation began in May 2019, and he was officially designated as Special Counsel in October 2020.
“It shouldn’t take a federal lawsuit to get answers to simple requests for information about Garland’s communications with Durham and basic budget documents about the Durham Special Counsel operation,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
WND reported just days ago about a new filing in court from Durham.
What if the powers that be in the FBI and other agencies had known and recognized at the outset that the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory about President Trump was a political scheme, that it was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and it essentially was made up? There likely would have been a different course for the United States, according to Durham’s filing.
The filing was in response to a demand from Sussman that the case be dismissed.
“Had the defendant truthfully informed the FBI General Counsel that he was providing the information on behalf of one or more clients, as opposed to merely acting as a ‘good citizen,’ the FBI General Counsel and other FBI personnel might have asked a multitude of additional questions material to the case initiation process,” Durham wrote in the filing.
“Given the temporal proximity to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the FBI also might have taken any number of different steps in initiating, delaying, or declining the initiation of this matter had it known at the time that the defendant was providing information on behalf of the Clinton campaign and a technology executive at a private company,” he added.
Durham already has obtained the conviction of a former FBI lawyer who admitted lying about evidence to make thinks look bad for Trump.
Durham said in the filing, “Far from finding himself in the vulnerable position of an ordinary person whose speech is likely to be chilled, the defendant — a sophisticated and well-connected lawyer — chose to bring politically charged allegations to the FBI’s chief legal officer at the height of an election season,” Durham explained to the court.
“He then chose to lie about the clients who were behind those allegations. Using such rare access to the halls of power for the purposes of political deceit is hardly the type of speech that the Founders intended to protect. The Court should therefore reject defendant’s invitation to expand the scope of the First Amendment to protect such conduct.”
He said at a trial he could deliver testimony from FBI and government witnesses that Sussman’s false statement was, in fact, material and relevant and even could have influenced the course of the “Russia collusion” claims.
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