Letter casts doubt on Times' Trump-Australia story

President Donald J. Trump with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison at the Imperial Hotel Osaka June 27, 2019, Osaka, Japan, at the G20 Summit. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

A letter from the Australian government disputes a New York Times story claiming President Trump "pushed" Australia to help Attorney General William Barr investigate the origins of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.

The Times claimed Trump was trying to "discredit" Mueller, "using high-level diplomacy to advance his personal political interests."

However the May 28 letter to Barr simply shows Australian Ambassador Joe Hockey offered to assist the Justice Department's ongoing investigation of the origins of the Russia probe.

Australia is among the "potential stakeholders" in the probe, as Hockey wrote, because a meeting between former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer and Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos in London prompted the FBI to open the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign and alleged Russian interference.

The Daily Wire reported the letter, citing Nine News Australia's Kerrie Yaxley.

In the letter, Hockey referenced Trump's May 24 announcement of a review of the origins of the FBI's counterintelligence probe.

"The Australian Government will use its best endeavors to support your efforts in this matter," he wrote. "While Australia's former High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, The Hon. Alexander Downer, is no longer employed by the government, we stand ready to provide you with all the relevant information to support your inquiries."

The Daily Wire noted that shortly after the Times story was published, a Justice Department source denied the claim that the president abused the power of his office for personal gain.

"The countries have been helpful. There was no pressing required," the source told Fox News.

The DOJ official explained that Trump was engaged in a routine diplomatic procedure, letting the heads of other countries know that Barr would be contacting the appropriate law enforcement entities.

The Washington Post followed up the Times report claiming Trump was trying to "discredit" Mueller’s investigation.

"Barr's personal involvement is likely to stoke further criticism from Democrats pursuing impeachment that he is helping the Trump administration use executive branch powers to augment investigations aimed primarily at the president’s adversaries," the Post said.

The DOJ explained in a statement that a "team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is separately exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election."

"While the Attorney General has yet to contact Ukraine in connection with this investigation," the DOJ said, "certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government have volunteered information to Mr. Durham, which he is evaluating."

'Barr should be talking to Australia'

Meanwhile, House Democrats are making similar allegations against the president in what they are calling an impeachment inquiry. They allege President Trump inappropriately used the power of his office for personal gain in a July phone call in which he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to "look into" a corrupt Ukrainian company's payments to Hunter Biden while his vice president father was the Obama administration's point man for the country. Two divisions of the Justice Department have concluded the president didn't break any laws.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in an interview Monday night that the accusations surrounding Trump's contact with Australia is "the beginning of an effort to shut down Barr's investigation to find out how this whole thing started," referring to investigation of now-debunked charges of Trump-Russia collusion.

"I want to say on national television," he told the Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity, "Barr should be talking to Australia. He should be talking to Italy, he should be talking to the U.K. to find out if their intelligence services worked with our intelligence services improperly to open up a counterintelligence investigation of Trump's campaign."

Graham insisted that if Barr is not pursuing these avenues of inquiry, "he is not doing his job."

The senator said he planned to write to officials in Italy, Australia and the U.K. to ask them to cooperate with Barr.

He noted that three Democratic senators wrote to Ukraine's prosecutor general in May 2018 warning that if he didn't cooperate with the Mueller investigation, the U.S. would stop aid to the country.

"So, here's what I want American people to know: It's OK to cooperate with Mueller to get Trump? But it's not OK to cooperate with Barr to find out if Trump was a victim of an out-of-control intelligence operation?

"We're not going to have a country like that," he concluded.