(Fox News) Special Counsel John Durham testified Wednesday that the CIA in 2016 received intelligence that suggested Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia — intelligence that the FBI ignored.
Durham testified publicly for the first time before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, just weeks after releasing a report that found the Justice Department and the FBI never should have launched the Trump-Russia investigation.
When asked about his findings, Durham said the FBI failed to “sufficiently scrutinize information it received” and did not “apply the same standards to allegations it received about the Clinton and Trump campaigns.”
John Durham testifies before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. (Screenshot/HouseJudiciaryCommittee)
He added that the FBI “did so even after the president of the United States, the FBI and CIA directors and others received briefings about intelligence suggesting that there was a Clinton campaign plan underway to stir up a scandal tying Trump to Russia.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, used the hearing to direct his line of questioning on the “Clinton Plan Intelligence,” which was never shared with the FBI Crossfire Hurricane team investigating possible Trump-Russia collusion.
“Can you tell the committee what happened when you took that referral memo and shared it with one of those agents, specifically Supervisory Special Agent Number 1?” Jordan asked.
“We interviewed the first supervisor of the Crossfire investigation, the operational person,” Durham said. “We showed him the intelligence information and he indicated he had never seen it before.”
Durham said in public testimony that the FBI didn’t pay enough attention to reports that the Clinton campaign was looking to tie Trump to Russia. (Reuters/Rick Wilking /File Photo )
Durham said the agent, Joe Pientka, “immediately became emotional, got up and left the room with his lawyer, spent some time in the hallway, and came back.”
“He was ticked off, wasn’t he? He was ticked off because this is something he should have had as an agent on the case — important information that the director of the FBI kept from the people doing the investigation,” Jordan said.
“The information was kept from him,” Durham replied.
In July 2016, then-CIA Director John Brennan “realized the significance” of that intelligence, Durham said, so much so that he “expeditiously” briefed then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden and other top national security officials.
The CIA properly forwarded that information through a Counterintelligence Operational Lead (CIOL) to then-FBI Director James Comey and then-Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, with the subject line: “Crossfire Hurricane.” But nothing came of that briefing or of Brennan’s subsequent referral of the information to the FBI.
