House Select Committee on Intelligence chair, Ohio Republican Rep. Mike Turner spoke to Jake Tapper on Sunday during the broadcast of “State of the Union”. During the broadcast Rep Turner alluded to the upcoming testimony of Special Counsel John Durham.
Tapper asked Turner:
“On Tuesday, your committee is going to hear closed door testimony from Trump-appointed Special Counsel John Durham. His report concluded that the FBI should not have launched the full Trump-Russia investigation as it did. It would have been ok to do a preliminary one but not the full-bore one. What do you want to know from former Special Counsel Durham?”
Turner responded:
“So this is very troubling. This is going to be troubling for you, especially as you read that the Durham report after the years of which there were these accusations of Trump/Russia collusion, and that these accusations were absolutely false.”
“Every investigation that has occurred, including now the Durham report, is — conclusively states that this was the result of people who had political bias who undertook an investigation based upon total Clinton campaign-funded research that was uncorroborated and turned out to be even untrue. And that’s where you have to be concerned.”
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELThe Durham report reads:
“Our investigation determined that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting.”
When your government is lying to you, when your government is telling you that something has happened that has not happened, that’s when our committee has to be involved and that’s when we have to look at what happened here, how do we make certain this doesn’t happen again,” Turner added.
Durham’s final report said the FBI used “uncorroborated intelligence” in its Crossfire Hurricane investigation of alleged collusion between former President Donald Trump and Russia ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
The Steele Dossier, an opposition research document funded by Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, played a major role in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. It has since been discredited. Likewise, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into the Trump-Russia allegations found no collusion between Trump and the Russians.
Durham is to provide closed-door testimony to Turner’s panel Tuesday.
Turner said what concerned him was that the government had taken material that started out as opposition research by the Clinton campaign and used it as the basis for a full-bore investigation that had political ramifications. Turner said he wanted to assure accountability in investigative processes.
“How,” Turner said, “do we make certain this doesn’t happen again? How do we make certain that we don’t have people with a political bias entering into political campaigns and using the authority of the government to have major media and the government take actions that are not based on truth?”
