SPECIAL COUNSEL’S REPORT CRITICIZES FBI OVER ITS TRUMP-RUSSIA INQUIRY
Durham faults agency for lack of ‘analytical rigor’
John Durham, the Trump-era special counsel who for four years has pursued a politically fraught investigation into the Russia inquiry, accused the FBI of having “discounted or willfully ignored material information” that countered the narrative of collusion between Donald Trump and Russia in a final report made public on Monday.
Durham’s 306-page report revealed little substantial new information about the inquiry, known as Crossfire Hurricane,
and it failed to produce the kinds of blockbuster revelations accusing the bureau of politically motivated misconduct that the former president and his allies suggested Durham would uncover.
Instead, the report — released without substantive comment or any redactions by Attorney General Merrick Garland — largely recounted previously exposed flaws in the inquiry, while concluding that the FBI suffered from confirmation bias and a “lack of analytical rigor” as it pursued leads about Trump’s ties to Russia.
“An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, it did not.”
Durham said he was not recommending any “wholesale changes” to FBI rules for politically sensitive investigations and for national-security wiretaps, which have been tightened in recent years. He did recommend that the Justice Department consider assigning an official to internally challenge steps taken in politically sensitive investigations.
The report amounted, in part, to a defense and justification of a lengthy investigation that developed only two criminal cases, both of which ended in acquittal.
Durham repeated his own insinuations, presented in court filings, that information developed by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign had helped fuel the Russia investigation, which shadowed nearly two years of Trump’s presidency and was eventually overseen by the special counsel, Robert Mueller.
He also repeated criticisms made in 2019 by an inspector general who uncovered how the FBI botched
wiretap applications used in the inquiry.
In a statement, the FBI emphasized its numerous overhauls since the 2019 report.
“The conduct in 2016 and 2017 that Special Counsel Durham examined was the reason that current FBI leadership already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time,” it said.
Durham went beyond criticizing the wiretap applications, writing: “Our investigation also revealed that senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor toward the information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities. This information in part triggered and sustained Crossfire Hurricane and contributed to the subsequent need for Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation.”
But in using the word “triggered,” Durham’s report echoed a conspiracy theory pushed by supporters of Trump that the FBI opened the investigation in July 2016 based on the socalled Steele dossier, opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign that was later discredited.
In fact, as Durham acknowledged elsewhere in the report, the dossier did not reach those investigators until mid-September. The FBI instead opened the investigation based on a tip from an Australian diplomat, after WikiLeaks published hacked Democratic emails, that a Trump campaign aide seemed to have advance knowledge that Russia would release information damaging to the Clinton campaign.
The special prosecutor’s findings were sent to Garland on Friday, a department spokesperson said.
Durham’s team submitted a draft report to the FBI and the CIA in March so those agencies could flag classified and other sensitive information, according to people familiar with the matter. A career Justice Department employee also inspected the draft for information that could raise privacy issues for government employees.
The chair of the House Judiciary Committee and a close Trump ally, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said on Twitter that he would invite Durham to testify next week.
Other Republicans seized on the report as confirmation that the Russia investigation had been tainted by partisanship, suggesting that Durham’s report would continue to fuel accusations that the Justice Department had been deployed against the former president.
“The Durham Report confirmed what we already knew: weaponized federal agencies manufactured a false conspiracy theory about Trump-Russia collusion,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Twitter.
Durham’s investigation traces back to early 2019, when Mueller delivered a final report that detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.” It established how Moscow had worked to help Trump win and how his campaign had expected to benefit from the foreign interference, but Mueller did not find sufficient evidence to charge any Trump campaign associate with a criminal conspiracy with Russia.
Seizing on the findings, Trump portrayed that report as vindication that the Russia investigation was based on a hoax, as he had insisted.
The next month, Attorney General William Barr assigned Durham, then the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing. Barr later bestowed special counsel status on Durham, allowing him to stay in place after Trump left office.
Critics have argued his investigation was superfluous: An inspector general for the Justice Department, Michael Horowitz, was already scrutinizing the Russia investigation for evidence of misconduct or bias, and he released a report on the matter in December 2019.
Horowitz did not find evidence that the FBI had taken any investigative steps based on improper political reasons. And he concluded that the investigation’s basis — the Australian diplomat’s tip — had been sufficient to lawfully open the full counterintelligence inquiry.
In his report, Durham also criticized the FBI for relying on the Australian diplomat’s tip without asking more questions about the credibility of what the Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, had said. But Durham also acknowledged there was “no question the FBI had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” what the Australians had provided, striking a contradictory tone.
Aitan Goelman, a lawyer for Peter Strzok, the former FBI agent who opened the Russia investigation and interviewed the Australians, defended the inquiry and noted the inspector general had said it was properly predicated.
“When the FBI received credible information from a senior official of a close American ally that the government of Russia was interfering in the upcoming presidential election on behalf of the Trump campaign, the bureau could not ignore that information,” he said in a statement.
Durham also broached the Steele dossier, building on extensive findings by Horowitz.
In his December 2019 report, Horowitz had pointed to multiple ways in which the FBI had botched wiretap applications used to target a former Trump campaign adviser with links to Russia, Carter A. Page. That included relying on allegations in the dossier in renewal applications after the FBI had reason to doubt its credibility.
Horowitz also developed a criminal referral against an FBI lawyer who had doctored an email used in preparation for a renewal application.
Picking up that referral, Durham negotiated a guilty plea with that lawyer, which resulted in no prison time. But the only two cases Durham himself developed, both cases of false statements against people involved in outside efforts that raised suspicions over Trump’s possible ties to Russia, ended in acquittal.