JUST IN: Durham Report Concludes Trump-Russia Probe Should Not Have Been Launched
Posted For: Layla Godey
by Isaac Schorr
John Durham, the special counsel tasked with investigating the origins of the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe into the connections between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian Government — also known as Crossfire Hurricane — has concluded that the probe should never have been launched.
Durham’s report, which was released to the public on Monday afternoon, argued that the FBI moved forward with the investigation despite “a complete lack of information from the Intelligence Community that corroborated the hypothesis upon which the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was predicated.”
“Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities,” wrote Durham, “We conclude that the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report.”
He went on to submit that the DOJ and FBI should “recognize that lack of analytical rigor, apparent confirmation bias, and an over-willingness to rely on information from individuals connected to political opponents caused investigators to fail to adequately consider alternative hypotheses and to act without appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign and a foreign power.”
Durham was appointed as special counsel in October 2020 by then-Attorney General William Barr. Over the course of his investigation, Durham secured a guilty plea from FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, who altered an email to falsely claim that Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, who was surveilled by the Bureau as part of Crossfire Hurricane, was not a source for the CIA. But he failed to convict ex-FBI attorney Michael Sussmann of lying to former FBI General Counsel James Baker about his work for the Clinton campaign.
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