Ex-Director of National Intelligence Expects ‘More Indictments’ in Durham Probe

John H. Durham, U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut since February 2018. United States Department of Justice

Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has said that he believes more people will be indicted as special counsel John Durham’s investigation progresses.

When he was in office, Ratcliffe said he had seen intelligence that suggested that the Democratic National Committee was working on a narrative that tied former President Donald Trump to Russia in 2016. He said then-Obama administration officials had been briefed on the matter at the time.

“[Then-Attorney General] Bill Barr, John Durham, and I, all looking at this intelligence, agreed there was not a proper predicate to open a criminal investigation into the Trump campaign, yet that happened,” Ratcliffe told Fox News on Feb. 14.

Ratcliffe, a former U.S. House member from Texas who was appointed by Trump, said White House officials talked about former CIA chief John Brennan’s notes and “Hillary Clinton’s campaign advisers.”

“Obviously the pleadings talk about Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyers, now you’re talking about consultants,” he said.

In 2021, Ratcliffe said he released roughly 1,000 documents to Durham.

His comments come as Durham filed a motion in court late last week (pdf) suggesting that a tech executive who was aligned with the Democrat Party spied on Trump’s residences and the White House when Trump was president.

“So, those are the issues that John Durham is looking at, and I think there’ll be many more—I would expect there to be quite a few more indictments because of that,“ Ratcliffe said. ”There was not a proper predicate to begin that investigation. John Durham has said that publicly already.”

Billing records that Durham obtained suggest that attorney Michael Sussmann, who allegedly had worked on behalf of the Clinton campaign, “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations” and that a technology executive met and communicated with Mark Elias, an attorney who has filed numerous election-related lawsuits on behalf of Democrats.

“Tech Executive-1 also enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract,” Durham’s filing reads.

Several media outlets identified the tech executive as Rodney Joffe, who this week issued a statement via a spokesperson that disputed Durham’s motion.

“Contrary to the allegations in this recent filing, Mr. Joffe is an apolitical Internet security expert with decades of service to the U.S. Government who has never worked for a political party, and who legally provided access to DNS data obtained from a private client that separately was providing DNS services to the Executive Office of the President (EOP),” the spokesperson said.

Sussmann’s attorneys, in a court filing of their own, also challenged Durham on Feb. 14, saying that his filing contains “prejudicial—and false—allegations that are irrelevant to his motion and to the charged offense, and are plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool.” Days after he was charged with lying to the FBI, Sussmann pleaded not guilty to the charge.