U.S. Attorney John Durham has started examining the role that former CIA Director John Brennan (shown above right) played in how the intelligence community assessed Russia’s election interference, according to The New York Times and other sources.

As part of his now-criminal investigation, Durham — whom Attorney General William Barr chose for this role — has requested Brennan’s emails, call logs and other documents from the CIA, The Times reported on Thursday; it cited a source briefed on his inquiry, as CNN noted.

In light of this and more, I pray that Durham is successful in identifying the entire criminal conspiracy operations — which I’ve written about since 2017. That includes the intelligence community outside the FBI.

Why do I say this?

The danger to our country is as high and grave as I’ve ever seen it.

Consider, for example, these words: “Viva le Resistance!” That comment is part of “footnote 400” in Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI’s FISA abuse.

These are the words, in fact, of a key attorney in the criminal enterprise we now know was operating in the FBI and Department of Justice around three key investigations: the Hillary Clinton email investigation; Crossfire Hurricane (the counter-intelligence investigation against Trump campaign team members); and the Mueller investigation into Russia collusion and meddling in the 2016 Trump campaign.

Smart tip: Always check the footnotes in legal documents. And don’t just check them — but study, research, and analyze them thoroughly.

If you haven’t figured that out after the last three-plus years in the United States, then go back and read the DOJ inspector general’s report on the 2018 FBI and DOJ actions prior to the 2016 elections and the 2019 report on the FBI’s FISA abuse.

The attorney sent these words to a colleague over a government messaging system just two weeks after President Donald Trump was elected. That key attorney is Kevin Clinesmith.

He was the number-two attorney for Peter Strzok on the mid-year exam look into Clinton’s emails; was the Office of General Counsel attorney (OGC attorney) identified as having falsified a critical email in the Carter Page FISA Abuse Inspector General Report on the Crossfire Hurricane operation, and finally; and was reportedly one of four members of Mueller’s team to be fired for extreme bias, along with agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page.

As Real Clear Politics noted, “IG Horowitz presents evidence that Clinesmith not only altered official documents, he completely changed their meaning. The altered documents painted Carter Page as a foreign spy; the originals said there was no evidence for that. The exculpatory evidence was hidden from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts. The lies helped gain a secret warrant to spy on Page.”

That makes Clinesmith the weakest link in the criminal conspiracy — the one thing investigators need to unravel it all — all the way back to the highest leaders in the Obama administration, across all organizations, and finally, to other countries’ intelligence agencies.

Durham, leading the criminal investigation, likely will focus on him and his close associates.

Those include tentacles to an attorney now working for the House of Representatives’ impeachment team; the current intelligence community inspector general, who approved the Ukraine whistleblower claims without any firsthand knowledge; Strzok; Page; and Andrew McCabe, the Deputy FBI director who was fired for “lack of candor.”

These folks should honor their dedication to our country and come clean about the conspiracy.

Many of us have said the whole set of actions of the FBI and Obama administration officials in the 2016 elections and into the Trump administration was suspect and has the smell of conspiracy. But now, we have the evidence — real evidence — that will lead to its total unraveling sitting in footnote 400 of the 2019 FISA abuse report.

Finally, the Mueller report, from its initiation and through its investigation, relied on the FISA warrant illegally obtained and renewed three times by the criminal conspiracy — whose objective was first to stop a presidential candidate. And when that didn’t work, it was transformed to a more than two-year effort to impeach a duly elected president using institutions the American people rely upon to keep us safe.

These facts should make all criminal investigation efforts and the entire Mueller report invalid based on the simple legal concept of “the fruit of the poisonous tree,” even though Horowitz showed that the Steele dossier — used as the central and essential information in the successful FISA warrants — was based on nothing more than bar talk.

Our country faces an impeachment of our current president also based on information by, and the actions of, this criminal conspiracy.

President Trump himself, in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Dec. 17, 2019, identified the abuses of power by this criminal conspiracy. He wrote, in part: “If you truly cared about freedom and liberty for our nation, then you would be devoting your vast investigative resources to exposing the full truth concerning the FBI’s horrifying abuses of power before, during, and after the 2016 election — including the use of spies against my campaign.”