Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said a raft of documents he provided to special counsel John Durham supports additional charges in his criminal inquiry into the Russia investigation.
A recent grand jury indictment against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer accused of lying to the FBI, is just the tip of the iceberg, Ratcliffe teased during a Fox News interview on Sunday.
“Michael Sussmann’s is the first of what I would hope would be a number, based on the fact — I provided not just those declassified documents, but I provided 1,000 intelligence community documents that I think support additional charges that I would expect John Durham to bring,” he told host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures.
Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman from Texas who served as overseer of the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies in the latter part of the Trump administration, announced in October that he handed over nearly 1,000 pages of materials to the Justice Department to assist with Durham’s investigation into the origins and conduct of the Russia investigation.
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“At my direction, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has now provided almost 1,000 pages of materials to the Department of Justice in response to Mr. Durham’s document requests,” Ratcliffe said in a statement at the time. “I will continue to ensure the Intelligence Community’s responsiveness to the DOJ’s requests. We also look forward to supporting the DOJ in further declassifications consistent with their investigation. As the President has made clear, we must be appropriately transparent with the American people and give them the confidence that the extraordinary work of Intelligence professionals is never misused or politicized.”
Ratcliffe also declassified two heavily redacted Russia-related documents, including handwritten notes from former CIA Director John Brennan showing he briefed then-President Barack Obama in 2016 on an unverified Russian intelligence report. The report claimed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planned in July 2016 on tying then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee to distract from her improper use of a private email server.
Sussmann, a former attorney at Perkins Coie, is accused of falsely telling the top FBI lawyer he was not representing any clients when acting on behalf of a technology executive and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign during a September 2016 meeting on possible links between Trump and Russia. Sussmann pleaded not guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI, with lawyers insisting he never said he didn’t have clients and was representing only the technology executive at the meeting five years ago.
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So far, Durham has obtained only a single guilty plea from former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who admitted to altering an email about a Trump campaign aide under government surveillance.
“We said there was FISA abuse. And Kevin Clinesmith was indicted on lying to the FISA court to spy on the Trump campaign. And then, on your show, we talked about this very fact, that the Hillary Clinton campaign created the Trump-Russia collusion. And the intelligence community and the FBI knew that,” Ratcliffe said on Sunday. “And they briefed not just President Obama, but Vice President Biden and the entire national security team. I expected and said there would be indictments forthcoming.”
