An investigation by a Trump administration prosecutor charged with undermining and discrediting the FBI’s probe into alleged ties between former president Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government has ended after four years and just a single criminal conviction.
The findings from the probe, led by Special Counsel John Durham, are laid out in a nearly 300-page report in which the once-respected career prosecutor — who was hand-picked to delegitimise the FBI’s efforts to determine whether Mr Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russia’s efforts to boost his candidacy — railed against the FBI for opening a probe into Mr Trump’s campaign based on “raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated intelligence” and accusing investigators of suffering from “confirmation bias”.
Over the four years Mr Durham worked to discredit the department’s investigation, he only brought a handful of cases against criminal defendants, including an FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to doctoring an email used to secure a surveillance warrant against an ex-Trump campaign adviser, and two other figures associated with the Trump-Russia probe who were acquitted at trial.
Mr Trump took to his Truth Social website to voice his approval of Mr Durham’s efforts, writing: “WOW! After extensive research, Special Counsel John Durham concludes the FBI never should have launched the Trump-Russia Probe! In other words, the American Public was scammed, just as it is being scammed right now by those who don’t want to see GREATNESS for AMERICA!”
But despite the ex-president’s boasts, the veteran prosecutor did not conclude that the FBI should not have launched any investigation into his 2016 campaign.
Mr Durham’s criticism of the FBI is centred around the bureau’s decision to launch a full counterintelligence probe into the campaign and Russia, rather than a preliminary one under which agents would have had more limited authority.
His findings appear to directly contradict a prior investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe by Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice’s inspector general.
In that report, Mr Horowitz wrote that the FBI had sufficient cause to open an investigation into alleged ties between Mr Trump’s campaign and the Russian government based on a tip the bureau had received from an Australian diplomat, who had revealed that a Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, had bragged that the Russian had acquired and were prepared to release damaging information about the campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Mr Trump’s Democratic opponent.
To some extent, Mr Durham does not dispute that report’s findings. He wrote that the bureau “had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” the allegations which arose from Mr Papadopoulos’ conversations with the Australian diplomat.
But he writes that the FBI should have opened a “preliminary investigation” rather than the full counterintelligence probe launched to determine whether there were links between Mr Trump’s campaign and Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.
Mr Durham also criticises the FBI for not conducting any “collaboration or joint assessments” of what they’d learned from the diplomat with “friendly foreign intelligence services or other US intelligence agencies”.
His complaint about the speed with which the FBI opened the probe states that “a full counterintelligence investigation into [a political candidate] was triggered, at the height of a political campaign, before any dialogue with Australia or the Intelligence Community, and prior to any critical analysis of the information itself or the potential for the risk of error or disinformation, issues that appropriately are addressed during assessments or preliminary investigations”
“The information – involving an ongoing presidential campaign - was precisely the kind of unevaluated information that required rigorous analysis in order to assess its relevance and value. Nevertheless, the FBI predicated Crossfire Hurricane and its subsequent investigative activities, including the use of CHSs, undercover operations and FISA coverage, on the statements attributed to Papadopoulos,” he wrote.
Mr Durham added that the bureau “did not possess any intelligence or other vetted, corroborated information regarding Trump or his campaign staff colluding with the Russian government” even though the investigation he criticises was opened to determine whether any such information existed.
The report also rehashes much of what has already become public knowledge over the course of multiple investigations into Russia’s efforts to boost Mr Trump’s candidacy, which a prior report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller called a “sweeping and systematic” campaign to help Mr Trump defeat Ms Clinton.
Mr Mueller — a former director of the FBI — conducted a year-long probe into the allegations that Mr Trump’s campaign had coordinated with Russian intelligence operatives, but was unable to find that Trump campaign officials had conspired with anyone connected with the Russian government.
He did, however, find hundreds of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials during the 2016 campaign season, and concluded that Russian intelligence operatives had been directed to help Mr Trump win the presidency, in part by hacking and leaking emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign officials through WikiLeaks.
A Senate Intelligence Committee probe also found that the contacts between Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian intelligence services posed a “grave” counterintelligence threat to the United States, and confirmed Mr Mueller’s findings that Mr Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had regular contacts with a Russian intelligence officer.
The Senate probe also found that Mr Trump’s associates were eager to exploit Russia’s efforts for his benefit by making use of the emails that were stolen by Russian operatives.
