High-level members of the Trump administration have no idea what is happening in special counsel John Durham’s investigation, according to former Rep. Trey Gowdy.
The South Carolina Republican told listeners of his podcast last week he recently met with some former officials and reportedly discussed the prosecutor’s inquiry into the origins and conduct of the FBI’s Russia investigation. After all, former President Donald Trump himself keeps sending out statements asking about Durham’s whereabouts, and little new information has been reported in recent months.
“The reality is no one knows,” Gowdy said. “I mean I — there are people that were really, really high up in government. Like really high up in government in the last administration that I talked to in the last week, and they don’t have a clue.”
However, Gowdy did not name anyone.
“I certainly don’t [know] as just a regular old, washed-up former country prosecutor in South Carolina. I don’t know,” he added.
Durham has run the politically charged investigation since the spring of 2019, which means it has lasted longer than special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry. The federal prosecutor was tasked with investigating the origins and conduct of the FBI’s inquiry into ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
While Trump and his allies claim the Obama administration unfairly targeted the businessman-turned-politician, Democrats and some national security veterans have dismissed Durham’s investigation as tainted by politics.
Some have praised the lack of leaks as a testament to the integrity of the inquiry. Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said last year it was a “good sign” that Durham was running a “legitimate investigation.”
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Under the Biden administration, Durham left his role as the U.S. attorney in Connecticut but was allowed to continue the investigation following his appointment as special counsel by former Attorney General William Barr. The Justice Department released a report on Thursday about the financial activity of Durham’s special counsel inquiry, showing the cost of the endeavor from Oct. 19, 2020, when Durham was appointed special counsel, through March 31 was about $1.5 million.
Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, declined to promise during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he would protect Durham’s investigation or make his eventual report public. However, Garland said he didn’t have any reason to think it wasn’t the right move to allow Durham to continue his work.
Much to the chagrin of Trump and his allies, Durham has so far secured only one guilty plea. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who has since left the bureau, admitted to Durham in the summer that he falsified a document during the bureau’s efforts to renew its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authority to wiretap former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page by editing a CIA email in 2017 to state that Page was “not a source.” Page denied any wrongdoing and was never charged with a crime. Clinesmith was sentenced to one year of probation and no prison time.
On his podcast, Gowdy explored several possibilities regarding the status of Durham’s inquiry. The former federal prosecutor also described what he thought should and should not be disclosed to the public.
“Part of me thinks that prosecutors who don’t have enough to allege a crime need to keep their mouths shut,” he said. “And part of me thinks that this is more than just a criminal investigation. It’s a counterintelligence investigation. It’s an investigation into whether procedures and powers that we give government, whether folks were good stewards of those powers, and you could make an argument that we should know that. We should know whether or not someone abused their authority or their power in a non-criminal way. And I guess we should know if they did so in a criminal way, but for some reason, the case is not prosecutable, I guess. But I am not convinced that we should know everyone who is investigated but never charged because that’s just not the way the system works.”
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Additionally, Gowdy critiqued his former Republican colleagues in Congress, some of whom spent years hyping up Durham’s investigation with talk about their hope for indictments.
“The lesson here, one of the lessons here I think, to my former Republican colleagues, is when you over-promise, or you assure people that there are going to be indictments,” he said, “and you assure people that folks are going to jail, and you have no power and no access to make sure that happens, you just after a while begin to lose credibility. Which is why you have never heard me say, ‘I promise you someone is going to jail as a result of the Durham probe.'”
