Durham report: FBI and DOJ had no proper basis to launch Trump-Russia investigation

Special counsel John Durham’s long-awaited report on his investigation into the Trump-Russia report states the FBI and DOJ had no proper basis to launch the controversial investigation.

Durham’s 306-page report, which he described as “sobering,” cast doubt on the idea that the FBI should have ever even launched its Crossfire Hurricane investigation into allegations of collusion between former President Donald Trump and the Russian government during the 2016 election. The special counsel concluded: “Based on the evidence gathered in the multiple exhaustive and costly investigations of these matters, neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

READ IN FULL: THE FULL 306-PAGE UNREDACTED REPORT INTO INVESTIGATION

Durham also highlighted the double standard in how the FBI investigated election-related matters tied to Trump versus Clinton.

As news from the report began to leak, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) announced his office “reached out to the Justice Department to have Special Counsel John Durham testify next week.”

The report found that “upon receipt of unevaluated intelligence information from Australia, the FBI swiftly opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation” and that at the direction of since-fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, since-fired Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok “opened Crossfire Hurricane immediately.” Durham noted that “Strzok, at a minimum, had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump.”

The special counsel concluded that “the matter was opened as a full investigation without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information” and that the FBI launched this Trump-Russia investigation without “any significant review of its own intelligence databases” and without “collection and examination of any relevant intelligence from other U.S. intelligence entities.” The investigation was also launched without conducting any interviews of “witnesses essential to understand the raw information” the FBI had received, as well as without using “any of the standard analytical tools typically employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence.”

The report asserted that if the bureau had taken these basic steps, “the FBI would have learned that their own experienced Russia analysts had no information about Trump being involved with Russian leadership officials, nor were others in sensitive positions at the CIA, the NSA, and the Department of State aware of such evidence concerning the subject.”

The special counsel also highlighted that “FBI records prepared by Strzok in February and March 2017 show that at the time of the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI had no information in its holdings indicating that at any time during the campaign anyone in the Trump campaign had been in contact with any Russian intelligence officials.”

Beyond the specific problems with the launch of the Trump-Russia investigation, which soon transformed into special counsel Robert Mueller’s sprawling investigation, Durham also detailed how differently the FBI handled similar Clinton-related controversies.

“The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign,” Durham wrote.

In one instance, FBI headquarters and Justice Department officials “required defensive briefings to be provided to Clinton and other officials or candidates who appeared to be the targets of foreign interference.” In another, the FBI “elected to end an investigation after one of its longtime and valuable confidential human sources went beyond what was authorized and made an improper and possibly illegal financial contribution to the Clinton campaign on behalf of a foreign entity as a precursor to a much larger donation being contemplated.” And in a third example related to investigating the Clinton Foundation, both senior FBI and DOJ officials “placed restrictions on how those matters were to be handled such that essentially no investigative activities occurred for months leading up to the election.”

Durham called this “markedly different from the FBI’s actions with respect to other highly significant intelligence it received from a trusted foreign source pointing to a Clinton campaign plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin so as to divert attention from” her own problematic use of a private email server.

“Unlike the FBI’s opening of a full investigation of unknown members of the Trump campaign based on raw, uncorroborated information, in this separate matter involving a purported Clinton campaign plan, the FBI never opened any type of inquiry, issued any taskings, employed any analytical personnel, or produced any analytical products in connection with the information,” Durham wrote. “This lack of action was despite the fact that the significance of the Clinton plan intelligence was such as to have prompted the Director of the CIA to brief the President, Vice President, Attorney General, Director of the FBI, and other senior government officials about its content within days of its receipt.”

Durham noted that “it was also of enough importance for the CIA to send a formal written referral memorandum” to since-fired FBI Director James Comey and to Strzok for their consideration and action, with the special counsel noting the investigative referral provided examples of information the Crossfire Hurricane fusion cell had “gleaned to date.”

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report in December 2019 criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against former Trump campaign associate Carter Page, for concealing potentially exculpatory information from the FISA court related to collusion denials by a number of Trump associates, and for the bureau’s reliance on the Democratic-funded dossier by British ex-spy Christopher Steele.

The DOJ later told the FISA court it believed at least some of the Page FISA warrants were “not valid.” FBI Director Christopher Wray agreed there had been at least some illegal surveillance and said he was working to “claw back” that FISA information.

Durham began investigating the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation while he was still a U.S. attorney in Connecticut after being asked to do so by then-Attorney General William Barr, who then quietly made Durham a special counsel in October 2020.

In early February 2021, Biden asked all Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys for their resignations, with Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss as an exception, who was asked to stay on as he investigates Hunter Biden. Durham was asked to step down as U.S. attorney from Connecticut but was kept on as special counsel.

While Horowitz argued in December 2019 that Crossfire Hurricane was “opened for an authorized investigative purpose and with sufficient factual predication,” Durham and Barr disputed the notion that the opening of the investigation was justified.

“Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the inspector general that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened,” Durham said at the time.

Durham’s “investigation into the investigators” lasted longer than Mueller’s special investigation into alleged ties between the Trump 2016 campaign and Russia. Mueller’s inquiry “did not establish” any criminal Trump-Russia collusion.

The new report by Durham did not include new criminal charges.

Durham charged Democratic cybersecurity adviser Michael Sussmann after allegedly concealing his two clients, Neustar CTO Rodney Joffe and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, from FBI General Counsel James Baker when he pushed eventually debunked allegations of a secret line of communication between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa-Bank during a September 2016 meeting.

But a jury found Sussmann not guilty of the false statement charge following a trial in the nation’s capital last year.

Durham also charged Russian analyst Igor Danchenko, the main source for Steele’s dossier, with misleading about the sourcing for the dossier’s claims, including related to the baseless allegations of a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between then-candidate Trump and the Russians, which the special counsel said is false. Danchenko was also found not guilty last year.

For years, the FBI went to great lengths to conceal from Congress and the FISA court the full extent of what it knew about Steele, Danchenko, and the dossier.

Durham revealed that, even after the Steele dossier fiasco, Danchenko was on the FBI’s payroll as a confidential human source from March 2017 to October 2020 before he was charged.

Durham obtained one guilty plea. FBI ex-lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty to falsifying a document during the bureau’s flawed efforts to renew FISA surveillance against Page.

Clinesmith worked at the FBI’s office of general counsel between July 2015 and September 2019, and Horowitz unearthed not just anti-Trump messages from him but also a criminal act for which he would plead guilty in Durham’s investigation.

Clinesmith, who worked on the Clinton emails investigation and on the Trump-Russia inquiry, as well as on Mueller’s team, admitted in August 2020 that he falsified a document during the bureau’s efforts to renew FISA surveillance authority against Page. Clinesmith edited a CIA email in 2017 to state that Page was “not a source” for the CIA when it had told the bureau on multiple occasions that Page had indeed been an “operational contact” for the agency.