New report criticizes FBI for launching 2016 Trump-Russia probe

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WASHINGTON The special counsel who spent four years investigating the Trump-Russia probe accused the FBI of negligence in opening an investigation based on vague and insufficient information in a sweeping 300-page report made public Monday.

Special counsel John Durham, who was named by then-Attorney General William Barr to review the origins and conduct of the investigation into whether Donald Trumps 2016 presidential collusion with Russia, criticized the FBI at length in the report.

The [Justice] The Department and the FBI failed to uphold their essential mission of strict adherence to the law, said the concluding section of the Durhams’ report. Senior FBI personnel demonstrated a serious lack of analytical rigor in the information they received, especially information received from politically connected persons or entities.

The FBI, in response to the report, indicated that the missteps identified by Durham have been addressed.

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin during their summit in Helsinki on July 16, 2018. Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images file

The conduct in 2016 and 2017 examined by Special Counsel Durham is why current FBI leadership has already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time,” the statement said. “Had those reforms been implemented in 2016, the missteps identified in the report would have been avoided. This report reinforces the importance of ensuring that the FBI continues to do its job with the rigor, impartiality, and professionalism that the American people deserve and rightly expect.

Durham lost the only two prosecutions he brought to court. But the report released Monday appears to be an appeal in the court of public opinion, an argument that Trump unfairly treated FBI officials who were too quick to unleash the bureau’s investigative powers.

Trump’s allies are eager to see the report, arguing that Durham will clarify what the former president says is that his campaign did nothing wrong but that the Obama administration is using the power of the federal government to try to influence the 2016 election. .

“WOW! After extensive research, Special Counsel John Durham concluded that the FBI should not have launched the Trump-Russia Probe! In other words, the American Public was scammed, just as it is being scammed today of people who don’t want to see GREAT. for AMERICA!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

The Durhams’ key conclusions were previously contradicted by a 2019 report by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog, which found that while the FBI made a series of mistakes, the decision to open the investigation was justified as a matter of law and policy and is not tainted by any evidence of political bias. .

Durham, who issued a statement disagreeing with the Justice Department’s inspector general’s report at the time, expanded his disagreement with the report released Monday.

Durham, a former US attorney in Connecticut, submitted his report Friday to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who read it over the weekend and ordered it released unchanged, a Justice Department spokeswoman said.

The Durhams’ report examines in great detail various aspects of the FBI investigation code-named Crossfire Hurricane, which led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller ultimately did not establish any coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, but he did find a series of contacts between campaign officials and Russians and a campaign willing and eager to receive help from in Moscow. A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee has reported further, saying that the Trump campaign has endangered US counterintelligence by opening itself up to foreign influence.

But Durham argued that the FBI was too hasty when it opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation in July 2016, after a Trump campaign aide told an Australian diplomat that the Trump campaign had received an offer from Russia to help Trump through of releasing damaging information on his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The objective facts show that the FBI’s handling of important aspects of the Crossfire Hurricane matter was seriously deficient,” the report said. “Several FBI employees interviewed by our investigators advised that they had significant reservations about aspects of Crossfire Hurricane and tried to convey their skepticism to their superiors. Others had doubts about the investigation, but did not voice their concerns. In some cases, nothing is said because of a feeling that there must be more compelling information in the possession of those closest to the decision-making center of the case than they have been informed.

“Importantly, if the actors of the Crossfire Hurricane faithfully adhere to their own principles regarding objectivity and integrity, there are clear opportunities to avoid mistakes and prevent damage resulting from their embrace of serious misinformation which they did not check and evaluate properly,” the report added.

The Durhams’ investigation found that at the time, neither the FBI nor the CIA had any intelligence suggesting improper ties between Trump and Russia. But it also noted that it had long been known that Russian intelligence had hacked Democrats, and that Trump had made his chilling public comments asking Russia to find emails missing from a server which Clinton used.

Durham said the FBI opened a full counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign based on raw, unconfirmed information, and that the key agent involved in the decision, Peter Strzok, was found to have leaked Trump to private text a friend.

Durham said the FBI has taken a different approach to other counterintelligence matters that have the potential to affect the election. For example, when it learned that an unnamed foreign government was seeking to influence the Clinton campaign through political contributions, the FBI acted cautiously and ultimately issued fact-specific defense briefings, warning the Clinton campaign officials on something the FBI decided not to do with Trump.

The Durham report also discusses intelligence gathered in 2016 that suggested the Russian government believed Clinton had a plan to undermine Trump by instigating a scandal that claimed the services interfered. on Russian security. Durham appeared to suggest that the intelligence information should have given the FBI pause in its pursuit of allegations involving the Trump campaign. A former senior intelligence official said the intelligence in question was never verified.

While the report is the first time Durham has drawn sweeping conclusions, much of the lengthy document summarizes known history, including fact-checking the so-called dossier gathered by former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, who part of the FBI has relied. to obtain a national security warrant to conduct surveillance on Trump aide Carter Page.

The FBI has not verified most of the dossiers, which appear to have been assembled in large part by a Russian named Igor Danchenko.

Durham prosecuted Danchenko on charges of lying to the FBI, but a jury acquitted him. Another jury acquitted Michael Sussmann, a lawyer Durham also accused of perjury.

Durham obtained a guilty plea from an FBI attorney, Kevin Clinesmith, who admitted to falsifying an application for a national security warrant for Page. Clinesmith got probation, and his law license was suspended for a year. The FBI also overhauled the way it deals with warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

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