(Washington) The General Prosecutor of the United States, Pam Bondi, asked the Department of Justice to investigate the origins of the investigation targeting Donald Trump and Russia after the recent publication of documents aimed at undergoing the legitimacy of the investigation establishing that Moscow had interfered in favor of the Republican in the 2016 American presidential election.
Pam Bondi asked a prosecutor to present evidence to a large jury after being seized by the highest intelligence official of the Trump administration, a person aware of the case said on Monday. This person was not authorized to speak about it and spoke under the cover of anonymity to the Associated Press. Fox News reported this information first.
It was not specified which former civil servants could be the target of a great jury, or where the Grand Jury would be located which could ultimately hear evidence, or what prosecutors – whether career employees or people appointed by political power – could be involved in the continuation of the investigation. It is also not known with what precise allegations those responsible for the Trump administration consider being able to constitute the basis of criminal accusations, that a great jury should approve for an indictment to be issued.
This development is likely to increase concerns about the use of the Department of Justice for political purposes, given the long-standing grievances on the investigation into Russia expressed by President Donald Trump, who called for the imprisonment of his perceived political adversaries, and because any criminal investigation would revisit one of the most dissected chapters of modern political history in the United States. It also surfaces at a time when the Trump administration is shaken by criticisms on its management of documents of the sexual traffic survey of Jeffrey Epstein.
The initial investigation, which has lasted for years on the interference of Russia in the elections led to the appointment of a special lawyer, Robert Mueller, who obtained many convictions against collaborators and allies of Mr. Trump, but did not establish the proof of criminal conspiracy between Moscow and Mr. Trump’s campaign.
The investigation darkened a large part of Trump’s first mandate, which has long focused its anger on senior officials of the intelligence community and the application of the law, notably the former director of the FBI James Comey, which he dismissed in May 2017, and the former CIA director John Brennan. The Department of Justice seemed to confirm an investigation into the two men in an unusual declaration last month, but did not offer any detail.
Many special advisers, Congress commissions and the Inspector General of the Department of Justice studied and documented the multiple efforts made by Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election in the name of Mr. Trump, in particular through a hacking and a leak in democrats and a secret operation on social media aimed at sowing discord and to hide public opinion.
But this conclusion has been questioned in the past way in recent weeks, because Mr. Trump’s national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, and other allies have published previously classified documents which, they hope, will cast doubt on the extent of Russian interference and will establish an effort of the Obama administration to bound Mr. Trump to Russia.
In a batch of documents published last month, Ms. Gabbard disclosed emails showing that senior officials of the Obama administration knew in 2016 that the Russians had not hacked the electoral systems of the States to manipulate the votes in favor of Mr. Trump. But the administration of President Barack Obama never claimed that the votes had been manipulated and rather detailed other forms of electoral interference and foreign influence.
A new outcry appeared last week when Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican President of the Senate Judicial Commission, published a series of letters that the director of the FBI, Kash Patel, said on social media, proving that the “Clinton campaign had plotted to trap President Trump and manufacture the hoax of collusion with Russia”.
E -mails were part of a classified annex of a report published in 2023 by John Durham, the special lawyer who was appointed during the first Trump administration to track down any fault of the government as part of the investigation into Russia.
Durham identified important flaws in the investigation, but has not discovered any bomb to refute the existence of Russian interference in the elections. His sprawling investigation led to three criminal cases; Two of them ended in a acquittal by a jury and the third by a guilt plea of a little -known lawyer from the FBI, accused of having made a false declaration.
The Republicans seized an email dated July 27, 2016, appearing in the newly declassified annex of Durham, according to which Hillary Clinton, then Democratic candidate for the presidency, had approved a plan aimed at linking Trump to Russia, while the campaign was in full swing.
Durham’s report took care to note that the investigators had not corroborated the authenticity of communications and said that the best evaluation was that the message was “a composite of several emails” that the Russians had obtained by hacking – which increased the probability that it was a product of Russian disinformation.
The FBI survey on Russia was opened on July 31, 2016, following information that a Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat that he had learned that Russia was in possession of compromising information on Ms. Clinton.
