The investigations into the Russia investigations, explained

“INVESTIGATE THE INVESTIGATORS,” President Donald Trump tweeted in April, days before the Justice Department released the Mueller report to the public.

Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have argued throughout the years-long investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia that the entire probe began based on shoddy intelligence and that federal law enforcement illegally spied on members of the campaign.

But now that special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe has concluded — and Trump has a particularly receptive attorney general running the Justice Department — the push to “investigate the investigators” has moved from rhetoric to reality.

There are several reviews of the Russia probe currently underway, both of which predate Barr. They include one by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog, whose findings are expected in the coming weeks, and another inquiry overseen by Utah federal prosecutor John Huber, which was prompted by Republican complaints about the Russia probe and the handling of Hillary Clinton-related scandals.

Attorney General William Barr is also conducting his own inquiry. Barr tapped the US attorney for Connecticut to help examine the origins of the Russia probe.

But media reports suggest the AG is closely invested in this process. And last week, the president gave Barr’s inquiry a substantial boost. At Barr’s request, Trump signed a memo ordering US intelligence agencies to cooperate with Barr and giving the AG sweeping powers to declassify intelligence documents as part of his audit.

Barr, who took over both the Justice Department and oversight of the Mueller investigation in February, has given credence to allegations, nursed by Trump and some top Republicans on Capitol Hill, that law enforcement might have spied on Trump’s campaign and that authorities overreached when they opened the investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016.

Barr told lawmakers in April that he had questions and concerns about “both the genesis and the conduct of intelligence activities directed at the Trump campaign during 2016.” He reiterated his concerns about law enforcement’s conduct during his Senate testimony in May.

FBI Director Christopher Wray has publicly testified that he doesn’t “personally” have any evidence that the Trump campaign was illegally spied on, and FBI officials who were involved in the investigation have defended their decisions. Democrats have dismissed allegations of FBI misconduct as a distraction from the damning findings of the Mueller report.

But since taking office, Barr has acted in the president’s interest. He faced stiff criticism for his handling of the release of the Mueller report — including his release of a selective four-page letter of the Mueller report’s conclusions and his decision to hold a “press conference” before the report’s release that attempted to spin the report’s findings before the public even had a chance to read the report.

And Barr’s newfound authority means he has control of what intelligence might be made public — which means some of these “investigations of the investigators” have the potential to become politically explosive.

Here, then, is an explanation of what we know about the reviews of the Russia investigation that we know are currently underway.

One of the main grievances Republican critics of the Russia investigation often point to has to do with the so-called Steele dossier.

In 2016, a retired British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele put together a series of reports alleging a grand Russia-Trump conspiracy, dotted with explosive allegations (including the possible existence of the “pee tape”). Most of the dossier’s claims, especially the most salacious ones, remain largely unverified.

The biggest issue with the Steele dossier is how it came to be. Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm, hired Steele to compile the documents — and Fusion GPS had itself been hired by a Democratic campaign lawyer on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Steele also turned over his findings to the FBI. Trump and his allies in Congress (and conservative media) have long claimed that the FBI used this questionable dossier as the basis for opening its initial counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016 — and thus that investigation and the special counsel probe that followed were nothing more than absurd “witch hunts” based on flimsy political opposition research funded by Democrats.

That’s not true, though: The Mueller report clearly states on page one that the FBI opened the investigation on July 31, 2016, after an Australian diplomat informed the FBI about a disturbing conversation he’d had with Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos two months before the WikiLeaks release of Clinton’s emails.

In that conversation, Papadopoulos had bragged that the Russians had political dirt on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign,” as the New York Times put it.

It was that incident — not the Steele dossier — that prompted the FBI to open the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

But the dossier was used in a portion of that investigation involving the surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The Steele dossier claims that Page, while working for the Trump campaign, met with Russian operatives in July 2016 and also discussed a deal to get sanctions lifted on a Russian oil company if Trump won. (Those claims have not been proven, and Mueller’s report “did not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government” in the Kremlin’s interference efforts in 2016 — though it also notes that the special counsel’s office was “unable to obtain additional evidence or testimony about how Page might have met with or communicated with in Moscow.”)

But the FBI used the allegations in the dossier about Page’s discussions as part of their application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) warrant to surveil Page in October 2016, though he’d already left the Trump campaign by that point.

The FISA application relied on additional evidence beyond the dossier. But Republicans (most notably Rep. Devin Nunes) have questioned whether the origins of the dossier — that it was commissioned by an opposition research firm hired by the Clinton campaign — were properly disclosed in the warrant application. The implication here is that the FISA warrant to spy on Page was improperly authorized, and potentially politically motivated.

Those familiar with the process have said this is not true, and that the political origins of the dossier were made clear. A judge also reviewed and approved the Page FISA application multiple times (these warrants need to be renewed every 90 days, and the last application was authorized by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in the summer of 2017).

Despite all of that, Republicans continue to insist this matter still needs to be investigated.

Trump and other Republicans claim that the Obama administration had the FBI plant a spy in the Trump campaign “for political reasons and to help Crooked Hillary win” — what Trump has personally dubbed “Spygate.”

As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explains:

[The] allegation centers on a retired university professor in Britain named Stefan Halper. Halper, an American who taught for years at Cambridge University in the UK, has been outed in the press as a secret FBI “informant” who met with several Trump campaign advisers in mid-2016 at the bureau’s behest. The goal of these meetings was allegedly to assess whether there were any real links between the Trump campaign and Russia, enough to fuel a wider investigation.

Halper, a longtime FBI informant, met with Papadopoulos around September 2016 to find out what information he had about the hacked Clinton emails and whether there were any connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. Halper also reached out to Page, apparently prompted by his summer 2016 trip to Moscow.

Trump and his allies argue that the FBI’s use of this confidential informant amounted to illegal spying, and that it was all part of a conspiracy to dig up dirt on Trump that could then be used to justify launching a wider criminal investigation into the Trump campaign. (Halper also had coffee with Sam Clovis, a former national Trump campaign co-chair, in late August or September 2016.)

But defenders of the FBI’s actions say this sort of thing is merely a standard part of any counterintelligence investigation. Barbara McQuade, a former US district attorney, told Beauchamp in May 2018 that the notion that the FBI was fishing for some kind of dirt on Trump is “baseless.”

The FISA warrant on Page and the FBI’s use of Halper as a confidential informant are the two main pieces of “evidence” Trump and his allies use to claim that the FBI unfairly, and potentially illegally, spied on the Trump campaign.

Barr, as attorney general, has stoked these claims. In a Senate hearing in May, he suggested that it seemed unlikely the FBI limited its intelligence operation “to a single confidential informant and a FISA warrant.”

“I would like to find out whether that is, in fact, true,” Barr said in response to a question from Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).

And now his Justice Department is doing just that.

So far, there are three reviews of the Trump-Russia investigation currently underway (that we know of). Only one — assigned to Connecticut US Attorney John Durham — was initiated during Barr’s tenure.

In March 2018, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, the DOJ’s official watchdog, announced that, at the request of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and members of Congress, he was “initiat[ing] a review that will examine the Justice Department’s and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) compliance with legal requirements, and with applicable DOJ and FBI policies and procedures, in applications filed with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) relating to a certain U.S. person.”

That “certain U.S. person” is Carter Page, and this is about that FISA warrant. Horowitz will likely be looking at whether the Steele dossier was essential to getting the wiretap on Page approved, and whether the information about the dossier’s origins was properly disclosed.

The IG also said he would examine “information that was known to the DOJ and the FBI at the time the applications were filed from or about an alleged FBI confidential source” and communications with the alleged source as it relates to the FISA application. This likely refers to Steele’s relationship with the FBI, and the extent of the FBI’s reliance on him.

Horowitz is also looking into the FBI’s use of Halper, according to the New York Times.

Horowitz’s investigation, then, has the potential to be fairly comprehensive. But it is not a criminal investigation. The IG has a lot of powers, including to subpoena documents and witnesses, but he can’t charge people with crimes or even discipline individuals — though he can make recommendations to prosecutors.

Horowitz is an Obama-era appointee, though he’s worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations. (And, as IG, he investigated Obama-era scandals, including the “Fast & Furious” gun-running scandal.) As Vox’s Andrew Prokop has written, the term “straight shooter” is one of the most common phrases used to describe Horowitz.

Barr has suggested that Horowitz will be wrapping up soon, potentially delivering his report in May or June.

The investigation run by Huber, the US attorney in Utah, might be the strangest — or at least the most confusing — of the Russia probe investigations.

President Obama appointed Huber as the US attorney of Utah in 2015, and Trump reappointed him in 2017. The investigation Huber is reportedly in charge of has gone on for more than a year. It appears to be something of a catchall for any and all Republican complaints about both the Russia probe and the lack of investigations into Hillary Clinton.

It really begins with the largely made-up “Uranium One” scandal. The gist of the allegation is that Clinton, as secretary of state, approved the sale of a controlling stake in a Canadian-based energy firm, Uranium One — which had mines and land in a number of US states, accounting for about 20 percent of US uranium production capacity — to Russia’s state-owned nuclear power company, thereby “giving 20 percent of US uranium to Russia,” as Trump has claimed.

Canadian financiers involved with Uranium One also gave millions in donations to the Clinton Foundation. So the implication here is that Clinton jeopardized national security (and to the Russians, to boot!) to enrich her personal foundation.

The allegation has been thoroughly debunked. First, the State Department was one of nine federal agencies and a number of additional independent federal and state regulators that signed off on the deal. Second, the majority of the Canadian financiers’ donations to the Clinton Foundation predated the first sale of the stake in Uranium One and occurred “during and before” Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008, per the Washington Post, so before she was secretary of state.

But Trump and his allies wouldn’t let the Uranium One thing go — in no small part because the false story made it look like Clinton, and not Trump, was the one potentially colluding with Russia.

In the fall of 2017, just as the Mueller investigation began indicting people connected to the Trump campaign, House Republicans (and Trump) began agitating for then-Attorney General Sessions to appoint a special counsel to investigate Clinton.

Sessions resisted, and instead quietly tapped Huber in November 2017 to look into Uranium One, the Clinton Foundation, and other matters related to the FBI investigation into Clinton’s email servers. Sessions, at the time, said that he’d assigned senior Justice Department officials “outside Washington.” (The letter directing Huber to begin the investigation was only released in 2019 after a liberal watchdog filed a Freedom of Information Act request.)

But Huber’s name came out in March 2018, when Sessions directed him to also look into additional questions about the FBI’s actions related to the Russia investigation, including whether the bureau overstepped in its investigation of the Trump campaign with the FISA warrant for Page.

But Huber’s investigation has been extremely quiet — maybe a little too quiet.

His role was made public just as IG Horowitz’s investigation was announced in March 2018, but conservative media outlets have reported that potential witnesses have gone un-interviewed and some Republicans in Congress have complained that they have not gotten any updates.

But other conservative critics just think it was a Sessions-led DOJ ruse to get everyone to quiet down about appointing another special counsel to investigate the FBI’s actions. “It is [a] head fake, a farce,” Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department lawyer who represents a Clinton witness and who almost represented Trump in the Mueller probe, told the Washington Times in April.

The Justice Department did not respond to Vox’s request for comment on the status of the Huber investigation, but a New York Times report in May suggested that some of Huber’s mandate would be passed off to John Durham, the Connecticut US attorney whom Barr has tapped to look into the origins of the Russia probe. Which brings us to ...

A few weeks after Barr appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and suggested that he intended to look into possible FBI overreach during the Russia investigation, the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that Barr had tapped John Durham, the Connecticut US attorney, to review the origins of the Russia probe and the FBI’s actions in the counterintelligence investigations. (The US Attorney’s Office in Connecticut declined to comment, and the DOJ did not return a request for comment.)

Durham has worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations reviewing law enforcement’s conduct, including in two high-profile cases involving the FBI’s handling of informant and mob boss Whitey Bulger and the CIA’s use of torture after 9/11.

“I was looking for someone who is tenacious, who is used to looking at sensitive material involving government activities, who has a reputation for being fair and evenhanded,” Barr told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

So Durham has the right résumé and bipartisan credentials to review the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation — which will likely include the questions about the FISA application for Page and the use of a confidential informant.

But right now, this looks a lot more like Barr’s probe. Though Barr picked Durham for the job, he’s made it clear that he’s deeply involved — and deeply concerned about the origins of the Russia investigation the actions the FBI took during the 2016 campaign.

“Government power was used to spy on American citizens,” Barr told the Wall Street Journal in May. “I can’t imagine any world where we wouldn’t take a look and make sure that was done properly.”

Barr hasn’t been specific in his public statements, but they’ve certainly hinted that he believes some sort of wrongdoing took place. But Durham is not conducting a criminal probe at this time, according to the New York Times. For now, at least, that limits the scope of his inquiry, as he won’t be using prosecutorial tools such as convening a grand jury or using subpoenas.

Still, Trump’s directive that gives Barr the “full and complete” authority to declassify government secrets suggests the attorney general will have a lot of discretion on what the public sees, particularly when it comes to Durham’s conclusions. And though Barr is working with CIA Director Gina Haspel and FBI Director Wray, he can ultimately overrule their judgments.

Trump’s decision to empower Barr with broad powers is the clearest sign yet that the Mueller report counteroffensive is in full swing.

Republicans cheered the move. “Closer and closer to the truth,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) tweeted Thursday. Democrats, meanwhile, are accusing the GOP of trying to deflect and distract from the damaging findings of the Mueller investigation.

And though Barr has made a less redacted version of the Mueller report available to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, he’s largely stonewalled Congress’s attempts to get the full, unredacted report and to hold hearings with witnesses, including former White House counsel Don McGahn.

“Trump and Barr conspire to weaponize law enforcement and classified information against their political enemies,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) tweeted. “The coverup has entered a new and dangerous phase.”

Trump has long railed about the “witch hunt” and accused former top officials, including former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, of “treason.”

But Barr, with his new authority and ability to selectively release information at his discretion, is now in a position to help Trump shape this narrative publicly and to give credence and legitimacy to the “witch hunt” conspiracy theory.