PakNews: The Justice Department Goes All-In on Origins of Russia Probe

Add one more investigation to the list. Monday evening it was announced that Attorney General William Barr had selected John Durham, district attorney for Connecticut, to head an investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. The nearly seventy-year-old Durham has a long history of exposing abuses inside the National Security State, including the protection of crime boss Whitey Bulger by his FBI handlers and the CIA’s destruction of tapes featuring torture during interrogations. Durham will be working separately but in parallel to Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, who is looking into political bias, and District Attorney for Utah John W. Huber, who is doing his own independent investigation.The primary goal of Durham’s investigation will be to examine FBI spying on the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. As previously detailed in the National Interest, in October of that year the FBI used raw intelligence to obtain a FISA warrant on campaign associate Carter Page, which then allowed them to collect information on the wider campaign. The attorney general came under fire for using the term “spying” to describe the surveillance of the Trump campaign but remained adamant that it was an accurate description. “My first job was in CIA, and I don’t think the word ‘spying’ has any pejorative connotation at all. To me the question is always whether or not it’s authorized and adequately predicated,” Barr told Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RH).