The Trump administration isn’t just trying to destroy the FBI—the CIA is also increasingly in its sights. Attorney General Bill Barr’s “investigation” aimed at undermining all the information the intelligence community has discovered about ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia is heavily focused on the CIA, Politico reports.
U.S. Attorney John Durham, Barr’s pet investigator, has reportedly asked the CIA to hand over the communications of former Director John Brennan, a favorite Trump target.
But whatever Durham is looking into, it can never be emphasized strongly enough how irregular it is that Barr assigned him to investigate something that should have been in the hands of inspectors general—and that Barr has explicitly rejected the report of the Justice Department’s inspector general and assigned Durham essentially to contradict it. As one longtime CIA official told Politico, the investigation “was initiated and sold in a partisan manner,” and the request to review Brennan’s communications “only highlights that concern.”
According to a former FBI assistant director, “Here, Durham appears to be acting as a sort of super IG and prosecutor in one. The difference: Durham works for the attorney general, while the [intelligence community inspector general], like any IG, operates independently from executive branch direction.”
The Trump administration is all about getting around forces operating independently from Trump’s direction, though, and Barr has been an enthusiastic part of that.