Washington – John Durham, the Trump-era special counsel tasked with probing the origins of the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, has concluded his sweeping examination of the office. conduct, finding that the Justice Department and the FBI “failed to fulfill their important mission of strict fidelity to the law” regarding events during the 2016 campaign.
The release of Durham’s approx 300 page report Monday comes four years after he began his investigation into the FBI’s actions in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Attorney General Merrick Garland received Durham’s report on Friday and it was delivered to the House Judiciary Committees on Monday and the Senate.
Much of the information revealed in the Durham report was revealed to a 2019 exam conducted by the Justice Department’s inspector general on the origins of the FBI’s investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. That investigation identified several procedural errors, but generally concluded that there was no “political bias” in the office.
Although Durham had broader powers than the Justice Department watchdog, he pursued prosecutions of only three people, two of whom were acquitted. The third, a former FBI attorney, pleaded guilty.
The special counsel said the FBI had an “obligation” to look into the allegations, but did not do full due diligence to open the investigation. Durham, in the investigation, concluded that the Department of Justice and the FBI “failed to fulfill their important mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities” described in his report. The special counsel’s examination also revealed that senior FBI personnel “exhibited a serious lack of analytical rigor toward the information they received, particularly information received from politically affiliated individuals and entities.”
“Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the intelligence community appears to have had any real evidence of collusion in their involvement in the initiation of the investigation into Hurricane Crossfire,” he found. special advocate
Durham said there was “a significant reliance on investigative leads” provided or funded by Trump’s opponents.
FBI Response to Durham Report
The FBI, under Director Christopher Wray, had implemented a number of reforms before the Durham report was released, a point he made in response to the report’s release.
The bureau said in a statement that “the 2016 and 2017 conduct examined by Special Counsel Durham was the reason current FBI leadership has already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have already have long been in place. Had these reforms been made during 2016, the errors identified in the report could have been avoided. This report reinforces the importance of ensuring that the FBI continues to do its job with rigor, objectivity and professionalism that the American people rightly deserve and expect.”
GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said has contacted the Department of Justice to have Durham testify next week.
Who is John Durham?
Then-Attorney General Bill Barr selected Durham, then the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, in May 2019 to investigate the origins of the FBI’s “Hurricane Crossfire” investigation, which was later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller . Durham was appointed special counsel by Barr in October 2020, weeks before the presidential election.
As part of his 48-month investigation, Durham was tasked with examining the following: whether there was adequate forethought for the FBI to open its Crossfire Hurricane investigation; whether the opening of the investigation was consistent with FBI policy; whether there was evidence that the actions of FBI employees or third parties violated the law; and whether the Justice Department provided false information about electronic surveillance requests.
Durham’s report takes aim at officials working in the top ranks of the FBI when its investigation into the Trump campaign and alleged ties to Russia opened, namely Andrew McCabe, then deputy director of the FBI office, and Peter Strzok, then deputy assistant director of counterintelligence. Both of us men were fired from the FBI in 2018.
Strzok, Durham wrote, “had at the very least expressed hostile feelings toward Trump,” and the investigation was opened “without ever having spoken to the person who provided the information” alleging collusion between the Trump campaign Trump and Russia.
“The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Hurricane Crossfire during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a marked departure from how address previous issues involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans targeting the Clinton campaign,” the report states.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that members of the Obama administration had spied on his campaign and committed “the greatest political crime in the history of the United States” by trying to sabotage his presidency.
What happened to the Durham report?
Durham’s investigation transitioned to a criminal investigation in the fall of 2019, and aspects of the extensive examination were turned over to federal prosecutors in Texas and Missouri.
FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith pleads guilty
The investigation resulted in a conviction: former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty in 2020 to make a false statement after he was found to have tampered with a CIA email cited in a request for a warrant to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Carter Page, former Trump campaign aide.
Page made several exculpatory statements, but federal investigators did not inform the Justice Department, Durham found.
The special counsel’s report detailed conflicting approaches between the FBI and the Justice Department on Page’s initial surveillance request, with records demonstrating “the inclination on the part of department personnel to move cautiously and FBI executives to move quickly.”
Durham found that the FBI drafted a FISA request on Page before receiving information from former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele raising allegations about the Trump campaign and Russia, but the information from the called the dossier was “used to bolster probable cause in the first instance. draft of the FISA application targeting the Trump campaign aide.
Citing the case against Clinesmith, Durham said other FBI staff working on the same applications to monitor Page “displayed, at best, a cavalier attitude toward accuracy and integrity.”
Bureau staff also “repeatedly ignored important requirements when they continued to seek renewals of FISA surveillance, even though they acknowledged, both then and in retrospect, that they did not genuinely believe there was probable cause to believe that the target was knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of a foreign power, or knowingly assisting another person in such activities.And certain personnel ignored significant exculpatory information that should ‘having caused the moderation of the investigation and the re-examination’.
Democratic attorney Michael Sussman was acquitted
In the first trial resulting from the Durham investigation, a jury in Washington, DC acquitted prominent Democratic attorney Michael Sussmann last year after he was indicted on a felony charge of lying to investigators during a Sept. 19, 2016, meeting in which he passed on now-debunked data that allegedly linked Trump Tower to Russia’s Alfa Bank. Durham accused Sussmann of hiding his ties to a tech executive and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign when he brought the allegations to then-FBI attorney general Jim Baker.
Russian analyst Igor Danchenko was acquitted
A third processing pursued by Durham, by Russian analyst Igor Danchenko, too ended with an acquittal. Danchenko worked with Steele, the former British intelligence officer behind the controversial Trump-Russia dossier, and was indicted in 2021 on five counts of lying to federal investigators about the sources of information he provided to the ‘Steele’s company. This information was then included in the file passed to the FBI.
Durham Report Recommendation
The only recommendation the special counsel made in his report was to establish a position to handle “politically sensitive investigations” and make difficult decisions.
Another review of the FBI’s Russia investigation
The Durham investigation is one of several that reviewed the FBI’s Russia investigation. In December 2019, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz posted his own review on the origins of the investigation, finding there was no evidence of political bias on the part of the office. But Horowitz found 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in each of the four warrant requests submitted to the watchdog court to hear Page.
In response to Horowitz’s examination, Durham released a statement questioning the findings, noting that his team had informed the inspector general “that we do not agree with some of the findings in the report as to to the prediction and how the FBI’s case was opened.”
Durham’s investigation was more forceful than Horowitz’s because he had the authority to issue subpoenas for witnesses and witness documents, and to impanel a grand jury.
Barr was not shy about criticizing the FBI for its conduct. In an April 2020 interview with Fox News, he said the office’s treatment of Mr. Trump “was one of the biggest travesties in American history” and said it had no basis to start your research. then, in an interview with CBS News in May 2020, Barr expressed concern that the Justice Department had increasingly been used as a political weapon.
“The people, you know, we should choose our leaders through the electoral process. And efforts to use the law enforcement process to change leaders or disable administrations are incendiary in this country and will destroy our republic.” , Barr said at the time.
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Catherine Herridge
