Attorney General Bill Barr delivered his most solid prediction yet on incoming developments from the Durham probe a day after he said they were trying to get parts of the investigation wrapped before Election Day.
“What’s dictating the timing of this are developments in the case. And there will be developments. Tomorrow, there will be a development in the case,” he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity Thursday night. “You know, it’s not an earth-shattering development, but it is an indication that things are moving along at the proper pace, as dictated by the facts in this investigation.”
Prosecutor John Durham is probing the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign. Barr has repeatedly underscored the part of the investigation that is of a criminal nature over the review of the FBI’s practices.
The revelation Barr promised surfaced Friday afternoon. A former FBI lawyer is expected to plead guilty to altering a document that helped get approval for a secret wiretap on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, the New York Times reported. The lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, has also reportedly expressed his opposition to President Donald Trump in text messages, which is sure to fan the flames of Trump’s conviction that there was a grand conspiracy against him in the intelligence community.
However, per the Times’ sources, Clinesmith’s charging documents will not reveal any larger anti-Trump conspiracy. The lawyer is expected to be charged with one felony count of making a false statement.
Trump appeared to level an ultimatum Thursday, stating that Barr would either buck “political correctness” and deliver him the pre-election exculpation he wants, or go down in history as an “average guy.”
“As to the political correctness, if I was worried about being politically correct I wouldn’t have joined this administration,” Barr told Hannity.
Barr also made further comments on the timing of the probe’s wrap-up in line with what he told the House Judiciary Committee last month: he will not hold back revelations from the probe until after the election, and is hoping to get pieces of it done before then. He told Hannity that they would do nothing “inappropriate” before November 3.
But what “inappropriate” means to Barr and what is means to general political observers may be two different metrics. In a break from Justice Department tradition, Barr has been full-throatedly bashing the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign, calling it recently “one of the greatest travesties in American history.”
Meanwhile, Trump has bypassed subtlety altogether in his hopes that Barr pushes Durham to reveal positive information for the President just before the election. He also has expressed hope that it’ll retroactively cast a pall on the Obama-Biden administration and deal his Democratic challenger a blow late in the race.
Barr and Durham “have all the answers,” Trump said on Fox Business Network. “It goes all to Obama, and it goes right to Biden.”
This story has been updated with reporting on Kevin Clinesmith’s impending guilty plea.
