Former President Donald Trump said there will be “a lot coming” from special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the early stages of the FBI’s Trump-Russia election collusion probe.
In an interview Monday with The Epoch Times, Mr. Trump said the special counsel would “fully expose” an alleged conspiracy by Obama-era officials to thwart his election. He called the collusion probe the “crime of the century.”
“These are bad people,” Mr. Trump told Kash Patel, a former intelligence official in the Trump administration who conducted the interview. “So I hope John Durham, for the good of the country, comes up with everything that you know took place and everybody knows took place because it has been exposed.”
“It would be really nice to have it fully exposed,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election. A 22-month investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller concluded that no one associated with the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to interfere with the election.
Mr. Trump has mocked months of silence by Mr. Durham, but the former president said he does believe in the probe. In the interview, he called Mr. Durham’s work “one of the most important jobs” in America.
Mr. Trump also repeated his unproven claims that he actually won the election but was denied the presidency because of rampant voter fraud.
Former Attorney General William P. Barr and others have repeatedly insisted there was no widespread cheating during the 2020 election.
’It would have been nice to have been done before the election because they cheated viciously and crazily, what they did was so criminal,” Mr. Trump said of the Durham probe.”It would have been good if the voters would have known that, but it didn’t matter because I won the election by a lot anyway. So, it didn’t. Honestly, I don’t think that was the big defining moment.”
Mr. Barr appointed Mr. Durham in early 2019 to investigate the actions of the FBI and others in the Russian collusion probe.
So far, three people have faced criminal charges arising from Mr. Durham’s probe. He indicated Igor Danchenko, a Washington-based analyst who was a key source for the so-called Steele dossier. Mr. Danchenko is charged with five counts of lying to the FBI about where he got his information for the anti-Trump dossier.
Mr. Durham also indicted Michael Sussmann, a lawyer with close ties to the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton.
Prosecutors allege that Mr. Sussmann falsely denied representing the DNC or the Clinton campaign when he reported suspicions about a now-debunked link between computers at Trump Tower and a Russian bank.
Former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced to a year of probation for altering an email that made it easier for the FBI to surveil a member of the Trump campaign.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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