The House Judiciary Committee will hear public testimony from former special counsel John Durham about its investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation on June 21, two sources familiar with the committee’s plans told NBC News.
Durham was accused by former US Attorney General William Barr of leading an investigation into the FBI and Justice Department’s handling of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, an investigation Barr had criticized a lot.
Durham completed its four-year investigation and filed a lengthy final report earlier this month that concluded that the FBI inappropriately launched a full investigation into the allegations, but stopped short of providing new evidence that someone in the government had violated the law.
«He [Justice] The Department and the FBI failed in their important mission of strict adherence to the law,” the Durham report says. “Senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor with respect to information they received, especially information received from politically affiliated individuals or entities.”
However, the Justice Department’s inspector general found in 2019 that despite a series of FBI errors, the decision to open the investigation 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 it had identified.
“The conduct in 2016 and 2017 that special counsel Durham examined was the reason that current FBI leadership has already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time,” he said in a statement.
In the course of his investigation, Durham obtained a guilty plea leading to a probation charge, but was also unsuccessful in convicting the defendants in two trials.
Republicans, including the Chairman of the Judiciary, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, have used the Durham report to argue that the Russia investigation and its ties to then-candidate Donald Trump were politically motivated and based on a premise defective.
Fox News reported last week that Jordan planned to call Durham to testify before the committee.
House Democrats have charged that Durham’s own report is politically motivated. Durham «is the number one example of the militarization of the federal government,» Rep. Dan Goldman, DN.Y., told MSNBC last week.