Justice: AG William Barr Assigns Prosecutor to Examine Russia Probe Origins

In a move likely to draw loud howls of protest from Obama administration holdovers, Democrats, and the media, Attorney General William Barr has reportedly assigned the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut to a job examining the origins of the FBI’s probe into the Trump/Russia collusion theory. John H. Durham will now take the lead on the investigation, following up on related investigations being conducted by U.S. Attorney John Huber and DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

Among Durham’s most important questions will be whether or not the FBI had sufficient probably cause to warrant putting members of the Trump campaign under surveillance in 2016. In testimony before Congress last month, Barr said that “spying did occur” throughout the investigation, and it was up to him to determine whether that spying was predicated on a factual – not political – basis. Thus, we can expect that Durham will be looking closely at the multiple FISA warrants issued against Carter Page as well as the informant, Stefan Halper, who was sent by the FBI to speak to campaign associate George Papadopoulos under false pretenses.

In an interview with Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham on Monday night, former Deputy Assistant AG John Yoo said that Democrats should be “quite worried” about these latest developments.

“By appointing a U.S. attorney, Attorney General Barr is essentially signaling that he thinks it’s possible that criminal violations occurred in the start of the whole investigation into any kind of Trump-Russian collusion,” Yoo said.

“You wouldn’t go with a U.S. Attorney like Durham, someone of his stature,” Yoo continued, “unless the attorney general thinks actually something criminal might have happened, that someone might have violated the law, that there might have been malfeasance, that people at the FBI or the Justice Department were acting out of partisan motives, not just out of incompetence or stupidity or they were duped by the Russians or Steele or the English or by the Clinton campaign.”

The latter explanation defies belief. Whatever we may think of Andrew McCabe, Jim Comey, Loretta Lynch, Peter Strzok, and the whole gang, they were not incompetent. They had been practicing their careers for years, and they knew exactly what they were doing. They knew exactly where the lines were, and they thought nothing of crossing them. Why? Because they had every expectation that the next president – Hillary Clinton – would absolve them of all wrongdoing. After all, they’d just given her the break of a lifetime, hadn’t they?

The cookie crumbled a different way, though, and now we might finally be on our way to seeing true justice done.