What did Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Loretta Lynch, and James Comey know about Russia-collusion — and when did they know it? John Durham dropped a bombshell in his testimony today at House Oversight, which will go on for at least a couple of hours or more, but this part wasn’t the bombshell. In his special-counsel report, Durham had already revealed that CIA Director John Brennan briefed these four in August 2016 that Hillary Clinton planned to paint Donald Trump as linked to Russian intelligence, presumably to shift attention away from her own e-mail scandal.

That briefing resulted in a “referral memorandum,” and one of its recipients was then-FBI director James Comey. Oversight chair Jim Jordan asks Durham whether Comey ever bothered to share that with the agents assigned to the newly launched Operation Crossfire Hurricane or ever presented to the FISA court when applications were made for domestic surveillance of Trump campaign officials. 

[….]

• JORDAN: “Did [Comey] share it with the agents…working the Crossfire Hurricane case?!”
• DURHAM: “No.”
• JORDAN: “Can you tell the committee what happened when you took that referral memo, and shared it with one of those agents?”
• DURHAM: “He indicated he had never seen it before. He immediately became emotional…”
• JORDAN: “He was ticked off!”
• DURHAM: “The information was kept from them.”

Let me expand the truncated transcript on Durham’s recollection:

• JORDAN: Can you tell the committee what happened when you took that referral memo, and shared it with one of those agents?
• DURHAM: We interviewed the first supervisor on the Crossfire investigation, the operational person. We showed him the intelligence information. He indicated he had never seen it before. He immediately became emotional, and got up and left the room with his lawyer, spent some time in the hallway, came back.
• JORDAN: He was ticked off, wasn’t he? He was ticked off because this was something he should have had as an agent on the case. This was important information that the director of the FBI kept from the people doing the investigation.
• DURHAM: The information was kept from them.

In other words, the director of the FBI knowingly withheld evidence pertinent to an FBI investigation. That resulted not just in errors made by the agents conducting the investigation that might have resulted ending what turned out to be a witch hunt, but also contributed to misrepresentations to the FISA court about the nature of the evidence they used to conduct surveillance on Trump campaign figures.

(READ IT ALL!)