Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said he wanted to assure accountability in investigative processes. | Efrem Lukatsky/AP Photo
House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner said Sunday that he hopes that testimony from special counsel John Durham about his recent investigation will shed light on government misconduct.
Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” the Ohio Republican said: “When your government’s lying to you, when your government is telling you that something has happened that has not happened, that’s when our committee has to be involved, and that’s when we have to look at what happened here.”
Durham is to provide closed-door testimony to Turner’s panel Tuesday.
Durham in May released his final report into his multi-year investigation into the origin of the FBI’s probe of possible links between Russia and former President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. While Durham’s investigation yielded not much in the way of prosecutions (much to the chagrin of Trump supporters who hoped it might ensnare Hillary Clinton and others), Durham did find individuals and institutions to scold in his 306-page report.
Turner said what concerned him was that the government had taken material that started out as opposition research by the Clinton campaign and used it as the basis for a full-bore investigation that had political ramifications. Turner said he wanted to assure accountability in investigative processes.
“How,” Turner said, “do we make certain this doesn’t happen again? How do we make certain that we don’t have people with a political bias entering into political campaigns and using the authority of the government to have major media and the government take actions that are not based on truth?”
As for the 37-count indictment pertaining to Trump’s post-presidential handling of classified documents, Turner said he wanted to see how the legal process would play out.
“I’m certainly not going to defend the behavior that is listed in that complaint,” he said. “But they’re going to have to prove it. And it’s a legal process that’s going to have to go forward.”