Headline via USA
Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered the Justice Department to continue investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation after documents were recently released about collusion between the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Bondi has ordered the prosecutor to present evidence to the Supreme Court after a referral from the Trump administration’s top intelligence official, a person familiar with the matter said Monday.
Fox News was first to report the development.
It was not clear which former officials might be targeted by the Supreme Court action, where the Supreme Court is located, which might ultimately hear evidence, or which prosecutors – whether career or politically appointed – might be involved in conducting the investigation.
It was also unclear what exact allegations Trump administration officials believed could form the basis for criminal charges that would require the Supreme Court to sign off on for prosecution.
In a package of documents released last month, Gabbard revealed emails showing that senior Obama administration officials were aware in 2016 that Russians had not hacked state election systems to manipulate votes in Trump’s favor.
Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also released a series of emails last week.
These emails were part of a classified appendix to a report released in 2023 by John Durham. Durham was a special investigator appointed during the first Trump administration to uncover government misconduct during the Russia investigation.
According to the annex, an FBI informant, identified as “TI,” provided the bureau with two intelligence reports in 2016 that described “confidential conversations” between then-Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and two employees of the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations, Leonardo Bernardo and Jeffrey Goldstein.
The report said that then-President Barack Obama did not want Hillary’s scandal to tarnish his legacy.
So, “the president is putting pressure on FBI Director James Comey through Attorney General Lynch to resolve the issue, but so far this has not shown any concrete results.”
The same report also said that Comey favored Republicans and that the FBI had no evidence against Clinton – because she deleted her emails.
Although the FBI informant’s intelligence was not confirmed at the time, the FBI ended its investigation into Clinton without filing charges.
Republicans have particularly focused on a July 27, 2016, email in Durham’s newly declassified appendix that alleged that Hillary Clinton approved a plan to link Trump to Russia during the heat of the campaign.
Durham’s own report painfully noted that investigators had not confirmed the authenticity of the correspondence, saying that the best estimate was that the message was “a combination of several emails” that the Russians had obtained through hacking.
