Members of the FBI‘s Crossfire Hurricane team were not made aware of intelligence about Hillary Clinton‘s 2016 presidential campaign allegedly cooking up a plan to tie her rival Donald Trump to Russia, according to Special Counsel John Durham.
During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) got Durham to establish how the intelligence was important enough to be discussed by CIA Director John Brennan during a White House briefing with President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden (who is now president of the United States), Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director James Comey in the summer of 2016.
That information came from a Russian intelligence report and was soon placed into a CIA referral memo addressed to Comey and Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok, who was involved in opening the Crossfire Hurricane inquiry. Yet, as told by Durham, Crossfire Hurricane agents who had recently started investigating alleged links between Trump’s campaign and Russia never got the memo.
Durham said “no” when asked whether Comey shared the information with FBI agents on the case. He was then prompted to recount how a supervisory special agent who had been involved in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation became distraught when Durham’s team shared the intelligence with him during an interview.
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“We interviewed the first supervisor on the Crossfire investigation, the operational person,” Durham said. “We showed him the intelligence information. He indicated he had never seen it before. He immediately became emotional, and got up and left the room with his lawyer, spent some time in the hallway, and came back.”
He added later: “The information was kept from him.”
Durham’s report, which the Department of Justice (DOJ) released last month, indicated the “Clinton Plan intelligence” could have been helpful to agents involved in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. “Most” of the individuals shown parts of the information by Durham’s team advised they had never seen it before, the special counsel’s report said.
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The report specifically points to British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s now-discredited anti-Trump dossier, stemming from research funded by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, that the FBI was found to have improperly used to secure FISA surveillance warrants against onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. It also references the unfounded secret backchannel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank that was promoted by Clinton and her team in the run-up to the 2016 election.
“Whether or not the Clinton Plan intelligence was based on reliable or unreliable information, or was ultimately true or false, it should have prompted FBI personnel to immediately undertake an analysis of the information and to act with far greater care and caution when receiving, analyzing, and relying upon materials of partisan origins, such as the Steele Reports and the Alfa Bank allegations,” Durham’s report said.
“The FBI also should have disseminated the Clinton Plan intelligence more widely among those responsible for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation so that they could effectively incorporate it into their analysis and decision-making, and their representations to the OI attorneys and, ultimately, the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court],” Durham’s report said.