But in the five months since Attorney General Bill Barr tapped Durham to investigate the origins of the Russia probe, and whether any inappropriate “spying” occurred on members of the Trump campaign,
he has not requested interviews with any of the FBI or DOJ employees who were directly involved in, or knew about, the opening of the Russia investigation in 2016, according to people familiar with the matter,
Those not contacted include former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok; former FBI general counsel Jim Baker; former chief of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section David Laufman; and former head of DOJ’s National Security Division Mary McCord.
Former attorney general Michael Mukasey, whose son Marc represents the Trump Organization and is a longtime confidant of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, recently speculated in a recent Wall Street Journalthat Durham may be trying to determine whether “Federal Bureau of Investigation tried to get evidence from Ukrainian government officials against Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, to pressure him into cooperating against Mr. Trump.
“The question Durham and Barr now seem to be asking is, ‘How was this information fed to the bureau in 2016?” said one former FBI official. “That’s distinct from what the IG has been looking at, and seems to indicate that their theory now is the FBI itself was duped by the intelligence community and its overseas partners.”
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