Former Attorney General William P. Barr is cautioning against counting the number of people prosecuted to measure the success of special counsel John Durham’s probe into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia collusion probe.
The lack of high-level prosecutions has frustrated conservatives and former President Donald Trump’s allies, who said the investigation fell well short of their expectation that major figures in the FBI probe would be indicted.
Mr. Barr said it is “dangerous” to judge the success of the probe by how many people were prosecuted.
“I’ve said all along that’s dangerous to get into the business of saying that the standard is how many people you prosecute because the object here was to find out what happened and to tell the story, to get to the bottom of it,” he said in an interview with CBS News released Friday morning.
“I think accountability looks like if people pay attention to the truth,” Mr. Barr added. “I mean, there was a lot of attention paid by the media to all the little details that they thought implicated Trump in collusion with Russia, all of which were nonsense. And yet, we had a two-year steady diet of this nonsense from the media. Now they should pay attention to the actual facts in the report. And that’s what accountability looks like.”
Mr. Durham finished up his probe this week and submitted his final report to Attorney General Merrick Garland. It included that politically-motivated FBI and Justice Department officials failed in their duty to uphold the law or act objectively in pursuit of Mr. Trump. However, Mr. Durham did not recommend any new criminal charges.
Mr. Barr appointed Mr. Durham to look into potential wrongdoing by the FBI when it opened its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into whether members of former President Trump’s 2016 campaign conspired with Russia to sway the election.
During his sprawling, four-year probe, Mr. Durham brought three prosecutions but netted only one conviction: a low-level FBI lawyer who admitted to doctoring evidence to obtain a surveillance warrant for Trump campaign figure Carter Page.
The other two cases involved alleged false statements to the FBI by a Hillary Clinton campaign attorney and a Russian analyst. Both were acquitted by juries in Washington and shed little new light on the bureau’s decision-making in 2016.
None of the three indictments involved high-profile FBI figures who greenlighted an investigation into Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign based on unverified intelligence and ignored evidence that countered the collusion narrative, according to Mr. Durham’s 300-page report released Monday.
Republicans say Mr. Durham should have mounted investigations into a slew of Obama-era FBI officials, including former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Both men were referred to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution by the Justice Department’s inspector general, but prosecutors declined to bring charges.
That has left activists and lawmakers frustrated.
“When government officials fail to abide by the boundaries set by the U.S. law and the Constitution, there must be accountability. Those who perpetrated this hoax to the American people must go to jail,” Rep. Daniel Webster, Florida Republican, said in a statement.
Tom Fitton, president of the government watchdog group Judicial Watch, said Durham’s report underscores the need for prosecutions.
“The report shows a yawning gap between what went on and the prosecutorial response,” Mr. Fitton said. “I think Durham dropped the ball when it came to prosecutions, and this was a glorified administrative review.”
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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