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As the impeachment inquiry by House Democrats gains momentum, Donald Trump’s attorney-general is running his own investigation. William Barr’s focus is not the president’s calls with Ukraine, but whether the now-completed justice department probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election was the product of a conspiracy against Mr Trump that included US allies.
This investigation of the investigators has come into focus in recent weeks as Mr Trump and Mr Barr have dragged allies such as the UK, Australia, Italy and Ukraine into old battles, just as a new war over impeachment has commenced.
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“I was investigated. And they think it could have been by UK. They think it could have been by Australia. They think it could have been by Italy,” Mr Trump said this month.
Though Mr Barr has appointed John Durham, the US attorney in Connecticut and a widely respected prosecutor, to lead the justice department’s review of the Russia probe, both he and Mr Trump have courted controversy by getting directly involved.
Mr Trump pressed Ukraine’s leader, Volodymr Zelensky, to assist his attorney-general, suggesting the Russia investigation may have originated in Ukraine. The US president made the request on the same July 25 call where he pushed for a probe into debunked allegations against former vice-president Joe Biden, a frontrunner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The US president made a similar request to Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, while Mr Barr has taken the unusual step of travelling to the UK and Italy as part of the review, employing ing a more hands-on approach than is typical for America’s most senior law enforcement official.
The efforts have cheered the president’s allies, who have long argued that the real scandal of the 2016 election was the behaviour of officials at the justice department and the FBI, which is part of the department.
“The American people deserve to know how the false “Russia collusion” accusation started,” said Jim Jordan, the ranking Republican on the House oversight committee. “That’s exactly what Mr Durham is doing with his professional and thorough investigation. He’ll find out exactly what happened and hold the right people accountable.”
But the review has also stirred controversy overseas and sparked claims that Mr Trump is using US institutions for his own political benefit.
“This is an investigation that has attributes of a political purge aimed at creating a counterfactual narrative to undermine, for political reasons, the legitimacy of a counter-intelligence investigation,” said David Laufman, a partner at Wiggin and Dana who helped oversee the early stages of the Russia investigation at the justice department.
Mr Durham has conducted his work with little fanfare since his appointment in May by Mr Barr, who has claimed the FBI spied on the Trump campaign. “Spying did occur. The question is whether it was adequately predicated,” he told Congress in April.
The justice department this month said Mr Durham was “exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counter-intelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election”.
