By Ken Dilanian - NBC News
The special counsel who spent four years investigating the FBI probe involving former President Donald Trump and the Russians accused the FBI of negligencein opening an investigation based on insufficient and vague information, in a 300-page report made public Monday.
Special counsel John Durham, appointed by then-Attorney General Bill Barr to examine the origins and conduct of the probe into whether Trump's 2016 campaign had secret pacts with Russia, criticized the FBI extensively in the report.
"The Department [of Justice] and the FBI failed to fulfill their important mission of faithfully adhering to the law," the conclusions section of Durham's report said. "High-level personnel showed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information they received, especially information received from politically affiliated personnel or entities."
Special prosecutor John Durham, in a photo taken in Washington, D.C., on May 17, 2022.Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images
In response to the report, the FBI said the errors identified by Durham have now been corrected.
"The conduct during 2016 and 2017 that Special Counsel Durham examined was the reason why the current FBI leadership implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have been in effect for some time," the statement said. "Had those reforms existed in 2016, the errors identified in the report could have been prevented. This report reinforces the importance of ensuring that the FBI continues to do its job with the rigor, objectivity and professionalism that Americans deserve and rightfully expect."
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Durham lost the only two prosecutions he took to court. But Monday's report appears to be an appeal to public opinion that Trump was treated unfairly by FBI officials, who were too quick to use their investigative powers.
Trump's allies have been eager to see the report, arguing that Durham would make clear what the former president has been saying all along: that his campaign did nothing wrong and that the Obama administration used the power of the federal government to try to influence the 2016 election.
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Durham's central conclusions were previously contradicted by a 2019 report by an internal Justice Department review group, which noted that while the FBI made a series of mistakes, the decision to open the investigation into Trump and Russia was justified by law and politics, and was not marked by political bias.
Durham, who issued a statement contradicting the Justice Department inspector general's report at the time, expanded on his counter-arguments in Monday's report.
Durham, who was the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, delivered his report Friday to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who read it over the weekend and ordered its full release without changes, according to a Justice Department spokesman.
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Durham's report takes a painstaking look at various aspects of the FBI's now-notorious Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. In the end, Mueller did not establish any coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, but he found a number of contacts between campaign members and Russians, plus that the campaign was willing to accept Moscow's help. A report by a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee went further, saying the Trump campaign posed a counterintelligence risk to the United States by opening up to foreign influence.
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But Durham argues that the FBI acted hastily when it opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation in July 2016, after a Trump campaign adviser told an Australian diplomat that Trump had received an offer from Russia to help him by publishing damaging information against his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Durham's investigation found that at the time neither the FBI nor the CIA had any intelligence evidence suggesting an inappropriate relationship between Trump and Russia. But he also indicated that it was known then that the Russians had hacked the Democrats and Trump had made his infamous public comment asking Russia to find a series of emails missing from a server used by Clinton.
Durham claimed that the FBI opened a full-fledged counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign "based on raw and uncorroborated information," and that the lead agent involved in that decision, Peter Strzok, had criticized Trump in private texts to a colleague.
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Durham said the FBI took a different approach to other counterintelligence cases that had the potential to affect the election. For example, when it learned that an unnamed government tried to influence the Clinton campaign with political contributions, the FBI moved cautiously and eventually held several "defense briefings," with specific evidence, in which it issued warnings to Clinton campaign officials, something that did not happen in Trump's case.
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The Durham report also discusses intelligence gathered in 2016 that suggested the Russian government believed Clinton had a plan to vilify Trump, "stirring up a scandal about alleged interference by Russian security services."
Durham appears to suggest that intelligence should have given the FBI pause in its probe into allegations related to the Trump campaign. A former senior intelligence official told NBC News that information was never verified.
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While the report is the first time Durham has reached broad conclusions, many of the documents summarize widely known issues, including the veracity of a report abridged by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, on which the FBI relied in part to obtain a national security warrant from a judge to conduct wiretapping in the Carter Page case. an adviser to Trump.
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The FBI was unable to substantiate most of the report, which appears to have been compiled largely by a Russian named Igor Danchenko.
Durham tried Danchenko on charges of lying to the FBI, but a jury found him not guilty. Another jury acquitted Michael Sussman, a lawyer Durham also accused of lying.
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Durham obtained a guilty plea from FBI attorney Ken Clinesmith, who admitted he had forged a warrant against Page. Clinesmith was paroled and his license was suspended for one year.
The FBI completely changed the way it deals with FISA warrants, which establish procedures for authorizing electronic and other surveillance to gather information about foreign intelligence activities.