The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, is said to be ordering prosecutors to present evidence to a grand jury investigating the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia inquiry, according to the Associated Press.
The criminal probe follows referrals from Trump administration intelligence officials and targets the investigation that established Moscow interfered in the 2016 election on Donald Trump’s behalf, a source who spoke on condition of anonymity told the AP.
Fox News first reported the development.
Details remain unclear about which former officials face potential charges, where proceedings will occur, and what specific misconduct allegations could support criminal indictments. The justice department did not respond to a request for comment.
The development is likely to heighten concerns that the justice department is being used to achieve political ends given longstanding grievances over the Russia investigation voiced by Trump, who has called for the jailing of perceived political adversaries, and because any criminal investigation would revisit one of the most dissected chapters of modern American political history. It is also surfacing at a time when the Trump administration is being buffeted by criticism over its handling of documents from the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking investigation.
The initial, years-old investigation into Russian election interference resulted in the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, who secured multiple convictions against Trump aides and allies but did not establish proof of a criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the Republican’s campaign.
Mueller’s investigation documented extensive Russian interference in the 2016 election and identified multiple instances where Trump may have obstructed justice, with the special counsel explicitly stating his report did not exonerate the president.
The inquiry shadowed much of Trump’s first presidency, and he has long focused his ire on senior officials from the intelligence and law enforcement community, including former FBI director James Comey, whom he fired in May 2017, and ex-CIA director John Brennan. The justice department appeared to confirm an investigation into both men in an unusual statement in July but offered no details.
Multiple special counsels, congressional committees and the justice department’s own inspector general have studied and documented a multipronged effort by Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf, including through a hack-and-leak dump of Democratic emails and a covert social media operation aimed at sowing discord and swaying public opinion.
The Republican-led Senate intelligence committee released a comprehensive bipartisan report in 2020 that confirmed extensive Russian interference and documented concerning contacts between Trump campaign associates and Russians. It found that campaign chair Paul Manafort shared internal polling data with a Russian intelligence officer and that the campaign welcomed Russian assistance.
But that conclusion has been aggressively challenged in recent weeks as Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and other allies have released previously classified records that they hope will cast doubt on the extent of Russian interference and establish an Obama administration effort to falsely link Trump to Russia.
In one batch of documents released in July, Gabbard disclosed emails showing that senior Barack Obama administration officials were aware in 2016 that Russians had not hacked state election systems to manipulate the votes in Trump’s favor. But Obama’s administration never alleged that votes were tampered with and had instead detailed other forms of election interference and foreign influence.
A new outcry surfaced last week when Republican Senate judiciary committee chairperson Chuck Grassley released a set of emails that FBI director Kash Patel claimed on social media proved that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 White House campaign “plotted to frame president Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax”.
The emails were part of a classified annex of a report issued in 2023 by John Durham, the special counsel who was appointed during the first Trump administration to hunt for government misconduct during the Russia investigation.
Durham did identify significant flaws in the investigation but uncovered no bombshells to disprove the existence of Russian election interference. His probe produced three criminal cases – two resulted in acquittals by a jury and the third was a guilty plea from a little-known FBI lawyer to a charge of making a false statement.
Multiple investigations during the Trump administration, including by his own justice department inspector general, concluded that while the FBI made procedural errors in its Russia investigation, the initial decision to open the inquiry was properly justified.
Republicans seized on a 27 July 2016 email in Durham’s newly declassified annex that claimed Clinton had approved a plan during the heat of the campaign to link Trump with Russia.
But the purported author of the email, a senior official at a philanthropic organization founded by billionaire investor George Soros, told Durham’s team he had never sent the email and the alleged recipient said she never recalled receiving it.
Durham’s own report noted investigators could not verify the communications as authentic, assessing the message was likely “a composite of several emails” obtained through Russian hacking , suggesting it may have been Russian disinformation.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
