Sen. Grassley Calls on Durham to Focus on DOJ, FBI Misdeeds

Whatever you think about former President Donald Trump, the facts Special Counsel John Durham is unearthing about the FBI’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign should disturb any civil libertarian.
 
In a dramatic floor speech last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) highlighted these concerns, making a plea to Durham to keep his eye on government misconduct by the FBI and the Department of Justice.
 
“The Justice Department and FBI hid critical information from the FISA court that would’ve cut against their case,” Grassley said. “They failed to correct the court record when they should’ve. Simply put, the Justice Department and FBI misrepresented information to the court. That conduct can’t be allowed to pass.”
 
Sen. Grassley, the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, noted that the FBI was treating Brookings analyst Igor Danchenko as a reliable source of information, even though it had opened a counterintelligence case on this Russian emigre.
 
“If this fact pattern was a movie script, nobody would believe it,” Sen. Grassley said, noting recent indictments of the Russia-connected Danchenko and a Clinton-connected lawyer. “With Durham’s recent indictments, we now have even more proof that the Trump-Russia collusion investigation had the wrong name; it should’ve been the Clinton-DNC-Russia collusion investigation.”
 
Sen. Grassley’s speech points to the greatest irony of this overlong drama – the hunt for Russian disinformation in American politics began with Russian disinformation. The obvious takeaway here is that Vladimir Putin knows how to stimulate Americans to chase their own tails. Sen. Grassley is right: Regarding the roles of the Department of Justice and FBI in this fiasco, a report may not be equal to the misconduct.