What to Know as Special Counsel Durham Faces Congress Over FBI's 'Russiagate' Probe

Released by US Attorney John Durham in May, the report digging into the origins of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the 2016 Donald Trump campaign's alleged ties to "Russia" found that the agency had been "seriously deficient," relying on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence."

Special Counsel John Durham, who completed an almost four-year-long review of the FBI’s handling of allegations of Russian meddling with the 2016 election and the Russiagate hoax earlier in the year, is set to face the House Judiciary Committee for his first public statements and questioning on Wednesday. The day before, Durham testified behind closed doors to the US House Intelligence Committee.

The FBI was badly in need of reform, were the conclusions drawn by both House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner (R-Ohio), and Ranking Member Jim Himes (D-Conn.) after the testimony.

“It was very clear that Durham believes that there was misconduct and if you’ve all been reading his report, he lays out what those instances of misconduct are. He gave us the impression that some of the misconduct is individualized. That there were bad people doing bad things. But then some of it is systemic,” Turner stated, adding that an overhaul was needed to ensure that this would never happen again.

'Seriously Deficient' Russiagate Probe

It all started back in 2019, when then-Attorney General William Barr tasked John Durham, serving as the Connecticut US attorney, with probing the FBI's decision to launch the Russiagate investigation. The latter was a probe into the Donald Trump presidential campaign launched on July 31, 2016. The investigation was launched after the release of another special counsel's report - by Robert Mueller - failed to find any evidence of Russia -Trump collusion, peddled by the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Barack Obama administration, and the FBI in the final weeks of the presidency of the 44th POTUS. Donald Trump was forced to spend close to three years of his Oval Office stint swatting away the claims (since debunked) that he colluded with the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential election - allegations he vehemently branded a hoax.

Robert Mueller's 2018 report - also the result of a Trump-ordered probe - laid bare the FBI's surveillance of Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign team. Accordingly, after the Mueller report, Durham was elevated to rank of special counsel in 2020, and ploughed away with his probe - at the time already under the Joe Biden administration. After an investigation lasting almost four years, Durham released his 316-page highly-anticipated report in May, 2023.

Released by the US Justice Department and titled a "Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns," it covered the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation, spanning 2016 and early 2017, aimed at digging into allegations that Donald Trump's presidential campaign ostensibly had connections with the Russian government.

Durham's report was highly critical of the FBI, saying agents showed "confirmation bias," and determined that the basis for opening an investigation into the alleged Russia-Trump "collusion" was "seriously deficient" and based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence."

The final report by special prosecutor John Durham is photographed Monday, May 15, 2023. Durham ended his four-year investigation into possible FBI misconduct in its probe of ties between Russia and Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

© AP Photo / Jon Elswick

Manipulation for 'Political Purposes'

Furthermore, the special counsel blew the lid on Democratic players, including former presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton and her entourage, who had flogged the false anti-Trump narrative linking him to Russia's Alfa Bank and the Kremlin. While swift to investigate Trump on dubious pretexts, the FBI swept under the rug at least four probes into Donald's presidential rival, Hillary Clinton.

"These examples are also markedly different from the FBI' s actions with respect to other highly significant intelligence it received from a trusted foreign source pointing to a [Hillary] Clinton campaign plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin so as to divert attention from her own concerns relating to her use of a private email server," Durham wrote.

John Durham discovered that the FBI had "failed to act" on a "clear warning sign" that the agency was the target of a Hillary Clinton-led effort to "manipulate or influence the law enforcement process for political purposes" ahead of the 2016 election.

According to John Durham, the Federal Bureau of Investigation also failed to corroborate any claims contained in the notorious anti-Trump Steele dossier. Former British MI6 agent Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous research doc, compiled it for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The outlandish claims in it were wielded by the FBI in a spate of secretive preliminary probes against Trump from 2016 onwards. The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) funded the dossier through the law firm Perkins Coie, which employed Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann at the time. However, John Durham found that Steele's source, Brookings Institution scholar Igor Danchenko, who had compiled the claims for the dossier, when questioned by the FBI was unable to confirm any of the assumptions.

"Rather, Danchenko characterized the information he provided to Steele as ‘rumor and speculation’ and the product of casual conversation," the report said.

Former President Donald Trump repeatedly lambasted the "completely fake" Steele dossier, describing it as a political witch hunt. Amid Russiagate, Moscow called the Steele dossier media speculation, and repeatedly denied interfering in the US election.

As a result of the Durham's investigation, former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was charged and convicted after admitting to doctoring an email to push ahead with surveilling former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann, however, was acquitted on charges of lying to FBI investigators about his ties to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. The case against Russian analyst Igor Danchenko also ended with an acquittal.

In response to the release of Durham's report, Trump posted on social media that it said, "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!"