U.S. Attorney John Durham has interviewed former top FBI attorney during the Russia investigation.
James Baker, who was recently hired by Twitter, met with Durham’s team in recent weeks and was quickly brought back for follow-up questions, a source told CNN.
The report found that witnesses who spoke with Durham could not figure out who a key target for prosecution was in his criminal investigation into Russia’s investigation.
Baker, who became general counsel in 2014 and resigned from the FBI in 2018, defended Russia’s investigation and FBI investigation into British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s anti-Trump case. He was involved in the filing process of at least the first Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warning application directed by former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Attorney General William Barr, who appointed Durham to test the origins of the Russia investigation, has said he expects developments from the inquiry by the end of the summer.
Twitter hired Baker as its new replacement general counsel in June, weeks after the technology giant sparked controversy through fact-checking labels on some of President Trump’s tweets. On May 28, Trump signed an executive order aimed at weakening the legal protections of social media companies.
Former Special Adviser Robert Mueller found Twitter was one of the social media platforms used by a Kremlin-linked troll farm to get interested in the 2016 election, His poll, which ended last year, also showed no criminal conspiracy between Russia and everyone in Trump’s orbit.
According to the CNN report, questions posed to witnesses suggest that Durham is investigating whether former CIA director and former Obama director of National Intelligence James Clapper “cooked up the intelligence” to undermine Trump. Neither Brennan nor Clapper have spoken to Durham’s team, but a Brennan spokesman said he wanted access to his CIA records for the interviews. Trump previously blocked him from accessing his personal CIA notes in the context of writing his forthcoming memoir.
Brennan has admitted that he is in the “crosshairs” of Durham. Last year, the New York Times reported that Durham requested Brennan’s electronic communications, telephone records, and other CIA documents. Durham is examining the question of whether Brennan took political action to pressure the rest of the intelligence community to agree with his conclusions on the motivations of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to sources quoted by the Wall Street Journal, and Barr confirmed that Durham is investigating the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment.
Also revealed in the report released Thursday was that Michael Mukasey, a former attorney general under George W. Bush, allowed to the outlet that he discussed with Barr in early 2019 about the possibility of conducting the so-called ‘investigators’ investigation’. lead that Durham, the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut, was eventually elected to execute.
Baker was a subject in the report on the FBI’s Russia investigation released in December by Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to FISA warrants against Page. in 2016 and 2017 and for the agency’s reliance on Steele’s through Steele’s democratically funded credit record.
Horowitz noted in his report that “certain former FBI agents who agreed to interviews, including [FBI Director James] Comey and Baker, chose not to ask that their security clearances for their OIG interviews be reset. This meant that the Inspector General ‘was unable to provide them with classified information or documents during their interviews to develop their testimony, or to aid their recollection of relevant events.’ Baker worked directly under Deputy Director Andrew McCabe from July 2016 to May 2017 during the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
Baker “told us that he also recognized that he was satisfied at the time that there was probable cause articulated in the design application to believe that Carter Page was an agent of a foreign power,” Horowitz wrote in his report. The watchdog noted that it was “difficult for him to fully explain to us the basis for his assessment without re-checking the entire application, but that he recalled Page’s ongoing relationships with Russian intelligence officers, even after the FBI Page made them aware that they were Russian intelligence officers, ‘key’ facts in his mind. ”
“Baker said he asked to read the application in this case because he recognized the sentiments, including that the purpose was linked to a presidential campaign and that the whole issue was about Russian efforts to influence the presidential election and whether those efforts encompassed all interactions with the Trump campaign, ”Horowitz wrote. “He said he expected the FBI to be called after the fact to justify its actions, and he wanted to ensure that his important FISA experience was ‘brought’ to the application.”
Former FBI Attorney Kevin Clinesmith has been the subject of a referral for possible prosecution after the Department of Justice’s Inspector General found that he had changed a document into a submission for the final FISA application for renewal. Clinesmith, 38, is expected to plead guilty to making a false statement, according to reports Friday.
Footnotes from Horowitz’s report, which was released to the public this year, showed that Steele’s dossier may have been compromised by Russian disinformation, and FBI investigators received information in 2017 “indicating that there is potential for Russian disinformation that Steele’s election report influenced. ” Page has denied any wrongdoing and was never charged with any crime.
Recently declassified notes from FBI interviews show Steele’s primary subsource, Igor Danchenko, underwent the credibility of Steele’s dossier in early 2017, and new public FBI interview points from early 2018 show the bureau that the House Intelligence Committee wronged about the credibility of Steele’s allegations of a Trump-Russia connection.
During an interview with Yahoo News, Baker said the FBI took the case “seriously”, but “we did not necessarily take it literally” and did not treat it as “literally true in all respects.”
IN Washington Post report late 2017 said Baker was reassigned from the role of general counsel as one of Christopher Wray’s first moves as director of the agency. He was under criminal investigation for accusations that he leaked unauthorized information to the media.
Baker resigned in May 2018 and joined Lawfare, a national security blog affiliated with the Brookings Institution, whose editor – in – chief is Benjamin Wittes, a friend of Comey’s. He later joined the R Street Institute and then CNN as a legal analyst, but he no longer works there.
