Special Counsel John Durham testified Wednesday that the CIA in 2016 received intelligence that suggested Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia – intelligence that the FBI ignored.
Durham testified publicly for the first time before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday, just weeks after releasing a report that found the Justice Department and FBI never should have launched the Trump-Russia investigation.
When asked about his findings, Durham said the FBI failed to "sufficiently scrutinize information it received" and did not "apply the same standards to allegations it received about the Clinton and Trump campaigns."
"The FBI was too willing to accept and use politically funded and uncorroborated opposition research, such as the Steele dossier," Durham said. "The FBI relied on the dossier and FISA applications, knowing there was likely material originating from a political campaign or political opponent."
He added that the FBI "did so even after the president of the United States, the FBI and CIA directors and others received briefings about intelligence suggesting that there was a Clinton campaign plan underway to stir up a scandal tying Trump to Russia."
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, used the hearing to direct his line of questioning on the "Clinton Plan Intelligence," which was never shared with the FBI Crossfire Hurricane team investigating possible Trump-Russia collusion.
"Can you tell the committee what happened when you took that referral memo and shared it with one of those agents, specifically Supervisory Special Agent Number 1?" Jordan asked.
"We interviewed the first supervisor of the Crossfire investigation, the operational person," Durham said. "We showed him the intelligence information and he indicated he had never seen it before."
Durham said the agent, Joe Pientka, "immediately became emotional, got up and left the room with his lawyer, spent some time in the hallway, and came back."
"He was ticked off, wasn’t he? He was ticked off because this is something he should have had as an agent on the case – important information that the director of the FBI kept from the people doing the investigation," Jordan said.
"The information was kept from him," Durham replied.
In July 2016, then-CIA Director John Brennan "realized the significance" of that intelligence, Durham said, so much so that he "expeditiously" briefed then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and other top national security officials.
The CIA properly forwarded that information through a Counterintelligence Operational Lead (CIOL) to then-FBI Director James Comey and then-Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, with the subject line: "Crossfire Hurricane." But nothing came of that briefing or of Brennan’s subsequent referral of the information to the FBI.
Durham's report said the FBI "failed to act on what should have been – when combined with other incontrovertible facts – a clear warning sign that the FBI might then be the target of an effort to manipulate or influence the law enforcement process for political purposes during the 2016 presidential election."
"Whether or not the Clinton plan intelligence was based on reliable or unreliable information, or was ultimately true or false it, 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 stated.
Durham's public testimony was part of a lengthy House hearing in which he defended his years-long investigation, saying "at no time and in no sense did we act with a purpose to further partisan or political ends."
"To the extent that somebody suggests otherwise, that’s simply untrue and offensive," Durham said, adding that his findings are "serious" and "deserve attention from the American public and its representatives."
"We found troubling violations of law and policy in the conduct of highly consequential investigations directed at members of a presidential campaign and ultimately, a presidential administration," Durham said. "To me, it matters not whether it was a Republican campaign or a Democrat campaign."
"The law ought to apply to everybody in the same way," he added.
Democrats used the hearing to slam Durham, and some even called him a "political hack" and warned that his reputation is "damaged" due to getting "involved with Donald Trump."
"My concern about my reputation is with the people who I respect and my family and my Lord," Durham replied. "And I'm perfectly comfortable with my reputation with them."
