Also in the Durham Report released Monday, said the FBI relied too heavily on information from Trump’s political opponents to conduct the “Russian investigation.”
The report is the result of a four-year investigation launched in May 2019. Trump administration Attorney General William Barr has appointed the Durham prosecutor to investigate potential FBI missteps in the early stages of Cross Hurricane, an undercover operation designed to investigate possible contacts between Donald Trump’s campaign and Moscow ahead of the 2016 election.
In his 306-page report, Durham writes that US intelligence and law enforcement had no “factual evidence” of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia before the launch of the sting operation Crossover. Hurricanes.
Durham also pointed out that the FBI treated Trump’s 2016 investigation differently than, say, the investigation involving Hillary Clinton, who ran for Democratic president that year.
Thus, Durham believes that Clinton and other officials were officially informed that they could become targets of foreign interference, while Trump received no instructions until the FBI began investigating four members. from his headquarters.
“The (DOJ) and the FBI have failed in their important duty of strict law enforcement due to certain events and activities described in this report,” Durham writes. “FBI leaders have demonstrated a serious lack of rigorous information they have received, particularly information from politically affiliated individuals and organizations.”
In response to the Durham report’s findings, the FBI said it had long since taken dozens of corrective actions to correct the mistakes made.
Durham’s report was presented to the US Congress on Monday, after current Attorney General Merrick Garland received a copy of the report on Friday.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan tweeted that he had invited Durham to testify about his report next week.
Durham’s findings are likely to have political implications for Trump, who plans to run for president in 2024 despite criminal charges in New York and two federal investigations, one into his possession of classified documents and another into attempts to annul the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump hoped Durham would release his report before the 2020 election, which Trump said could hurt Democrats’ chances in the midterm congressional elections.
At the same time, two juries acquitted two people that Special Counsel Durham tried to prosecute as part of his investigation.
In one case, a District of Columbia jury acquitted former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. Durham accused him of making false statements to an FBI agent in September 2016, whom the attorney met with to brief him on possible ties between Trump’s company and a Russian bank.
The Durham investigation suffered another major setback a few months later, when a Virginia jury acquitted Russian-born political analyst Igor Danchenko. He was accused of providing false testimony to the FBI during a conversation about the sources of information that came to him, which partly formed the basis of the so-called “Steele dossier”.
The document, written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, contained allegations of links between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, and contained details of Trump’s lewd behavior during his trip to Moscow, many of which have never been confirmed.
Later, an investigation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General found that the FBI improperly relied on unsubstantiated allegations in the Steele dossier when filing a court order to spy on Carter’s communications. Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.
Durham’s allegations have only been recognized in court in the case of former FBI attorney Kevin Klinessmith.
The attorney general accused him of changing the email address used to obtain a court order to wiretap Carter Page.
Durham’s report reflects concerns previously expressed by the DOJ inspector general about the FBI’s process for asking the Foreign Intelligence Tribunal to conduct wiretaps.
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