For years, President Donald Trump has complained about FBI officials who investigated his campaign’s ties to Russia, and about the “rogue bureaucrats of the Deep State” at intelligence agencies. A Justice Department inquiry investigating those officials has taken on another of Trump’s irritants: leaks to the news media, the New York Times reports. Investigators for U.S. Attorney John Durham of Connecticut have asked witnesses about news articles in 2017 that former administration officials blame for prompting the chaos that dominated the early days of the Trump presidency. Among them was a Washington Post column about then-national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Attorney General William Barr has promoted the investigation in recent days, saying that Durham has uncovered “troubling” problems. The new details show that Durham’s inquiry is broader than previously known — not just examining intelligence on Russia and how it was handled or investigative decisions by the FBI but whether sources spoke to the Post intending to damage Trump’s presidency. Durham has examined a 2017 column by the Post’s David Ignatius, who said Flynn had spoken in late 2016 with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S. at the time, as the Obama administration was about to place sanctions on Russia for its election sabotage. Ignatius suggested that because Flynn was apparently conducting foreign policy while another administration was in power, he might have violated the Logan Act. Flynn later resigned after lying to the vice president and other White House officials about the call with Kislyak. The Ignatius column “set off a chain of events that helped lead to the Russia probe,” K.T. McFarland, the former deputy national security adviser to Trump, wrote in her book, “Revolution: Trump, Washington and ‘We the People.’ ”