Durham special counsel investigation
[1] In December 2020, Attorney General William Barr announced that he had elevated Durham's status and authority by appointing him as a special counsel, allowing him to continue the investigation after the end of the Trump presidency.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz contradicted those claims by testifying to Congress that the FBI showed no political bias motivating its investigation into Trump and his possible connections with Russia.
One was an FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to altering an email that was included in a June 2017 application for a surveillance warrant on a former Trump campaign aide; he was sentenced to probation.
[22] The New York Times reported in January 2023 that Durham and Barr, contrary to their better knowledge, allowed the media and public to infer that it was crimes committed by the intelligence community against Trump that were the object of this investigation.
[2][23] In December 2020, Barr revealed to Congress that on October 19 he had secretly appointed Durham to be special counsel, allowing him to continue the investigation of the origins of the FBI probe into Russian interference after the Trump administration ended.
[35][36] Barr also released a statement challenging the findings of the report, later asserting on Fox News that the investigation had been opened "without any basis" and that "what happened to [Trump] was one of the greatest travesties in American history.
[41][42][43] The New York Times reported in December 2019 that Durham was examining the role of former CIA director John Brennan in assessing Russian interference in 2016, requesting emails, call logs and other documents.
[44] The Times reported in February 2020 that Durham was examining whether intelligence community officials, and specifically Brennan, had concealed or manipulated evidence of Russian interference to achieve a desired result.
Moreover, a monthslong review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws – including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court – that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.
[2]On October 24, 2019, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported that Durham's inquiry had been elevated to a criminal investigation, raising concerns of politicization of the Justice Department to pursue political enemies of the President.
[7][51] The Times reported on November 22 that the Justice Department inspector general had made a criminal referral to Durham regarding Kevin Clinesmith, a low-level FBI attorney assigned to the Mueller probe who had resigned in February 2018.
Clinesmith was accused of altering an email during the process of renewing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap warrant against former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.
Sussmann focuses on privacy and cybersecurity law and had approached Baker to discuss what he and others believed to be suspicious communications between computer servers at the Russian Alfa-Bank and the Trump Organization.
Perkins Coie represented the Clinton presidential campaign, and one of its partners, Marc Elias, commissioned Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research on Trump, which led to the production of the Steele dossier.
A second document was a June 2019 Justice Department inspector general interview with Baker in which he said the Sussmann meeting "related to strange interactions that some number of people that were his clients, who were, he described as I recall it, sort of cybersecurity experts, had found."
[60] A Durham prosecutor later asserted that subsequent to his 2019 and 2020 interviews, Baker "affirmed and then re-affirmed his now-clear recollection of the defendant’s false statement" after refreshing his memory with contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous notes.
Durham asserted that Sussmann bringing his information to the CIA was part of a broader effort to raise the intelligence community's suspicions of Trump's connections to Russia shortly after he took office.
'"[66][75] During a March 2022 court hearing, presiding judge Casey Cooper remarked that Durham's February motion relating to Joffe created a "dustup" that "strikes me as a sideshow in many respects," adding "I don't know why the information is in there."
[77] Nine days before the trial, Cooper ruled Durham could not present an argument to the jury that Sussmann was part of a broad "joint venture" involving the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS, Democratic operatives and various technology researchers.
Cooper ruled prosecutors could question witnesses about the scope of the DNS analysis, but would not be allowed to introduce evidence that Joffe allegedly had doubts about the accuracy of some of the data.
After the Sussmann prosecution failed, Barr stated it "accomplished something far more important" because it "crystallized the central role played by the Hillary campaign in launching as a dirty trick the whole Russiagate collusion narrative and fanning the flames of it.
[93] In an order at the beginning of October 2022, the court "excluded from the trial large amounts of information that Mr. Durham had wanted to showcase" as not being evidence for the charges of making false statements.
After Dannehy learned that other Durham prosecutors had drafted such a report, which she said contained disputed information and should not be released just before an election, she erupted, sent colleagues a memo explaining her concerns, and resigned.
The Russian memos claimed that Benardo and Democratic congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz had discussed how then-attorney general Loretta Lynch had purportedly promised to keep the Hillary Clinton email investigation from going too far.
Barr and Durham traveled to Britain and Italy to determine if their intelligence agencies had found anything about the Trump campaign and relayed it to the United States, but both countries denied doing so.
Italian officials did, however, tell Barr and Durham that they had evidence linking Trump to certain suspected financial crimes, which the men considered serious enough to open a criminal investigation.
Durham said that the failure of the FBI "to critically analyze information that ran counter to the narrative of a Trump/Russia collusive relationship throughout Crossfire Hurricane is extremely troublesome" and caused "severe reputational harm" to the bureau.
He largely addressed weaknesses in FBI procedures previously reported by the DOJ inspector general in 2019, notably botched wiretap applications for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
This 2016 preliminary investigation was opened based on information from the book Clinton Cash, written by Peter Schweizer, a senior editor of the far-right media organization Breitbart News.
That person would be tasked with challenging every step of such investigations, including whether officials appropriately adhered to the rules governing applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which handles matters of national security.
