The special counsel’s probe into the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation has ended. There were no new charges issued but John Durham did criticize the bureau for launching the investigation, The Associated Press reported.
The approximately 300-page report said there were several missteps by the FBI and Justice Department as they investigated alleged colluding with Russia by the now-former president, adding that the FBI had a full investigation based on “raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated intelligence” and that the speed of the bureau’s investigation was not normal, the AP reported.
Despite the issues that Durham said he uncovered, and that the FBI “failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law,” he said in the report that there should not be “any wholesale changes” to the FBI or Justice Department guidelines or policies, CNN reported.
Instead, there should be a renewed fidelity to the old,” CNN reported.
Update 7:15 p.m. EDT May 15: In a statement posted on his Truth Social account, former President Donald Trump said the report “spells out in great detail the Democratic Hoax that was perpetrated upon me and the American people.”
Trump added that “with an honest Media, we are looking at the Crime of the Century!”
-- Bob D’Angelo, Cox Media Group National Content Desk
Original report: Durham was appointed by then-Attorney General William Barr to look at how the government agency looked for links between the Trump campaign and Russia’s attempts to interfere with the U.S. presidential election. Durham’s probe was launched almost four years to the day before today’s release, The Washington Post reported.
As the newspaper characterized it, Durham investigated the investigators who worked for a prior special counsel: Robert Mueller.
Trump had called the investigation by Mueller into his campaign “the crime of the century,” claiming that the robe was a conspiracy to end Trump’s campaign, the AP reported.
Durham said the case caused “severe reputational harm” to the FBI and that bureau employees used “seriously flawed information” and followed their “own principles regarding objectivity and integrity.”
He also found that FBI investigators relied on “confirmation bias” and ignored or rationalized evidence that was in opposition to their beliefs that there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign the AP reported.
Durham wrote that Pete Strozok, the ex-deputy director of the FBI’s counter-intelligence division, “at a minimum, had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump,” CNN reported. Durham referred to texts between Strzok and then-FBI attorney Lisa Page.
Durham also focused on FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, CNN reported.
Durham also pointed out that when FBI agents discovered that a foreign actor tried to gain influence on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, the FBI gave her campaign leaders a briefing. When similar allegations focused on the Trump campaign, Durham said the FBI started to investigate his campaign without giving him the same type of briefing, the Post reported.
Durham’s investigation brought a guilty plea from a low-ranking FBI employee and two criminal court losses for the only cases that were taken to trial, the AP reported.