Durham Report Finds FBI Did Not Have Enough 'Factual Evidence' to Investigate Trump 2016 Campaign
May 15 2023, Published 5:45 p.m. ET
Special Counsel John Durham released his official report on the investigation of the FBI and their probe into allegations of collusion between Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. Durham's report found that the bureau did not have enough "factual evidence" for an investigation into the accusations, RadarOnline.com has learned.
Durham laid out his findings in the report's 300+ pages, which condemned the FBI and the Department of Justice for failing to "uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law."
The four-year-long investigation cost American taxpayers more than $6 million.
John Durham
The report focused on evidence related to the Trump-Russia collusion and revealed that initial findings lacked the substance needed for grounds of a federal investigation. The codeword "Crossfire Hurricane" was used to refer to the FBI probe.
"Based on the evidence gathered in the multiple exhaustive and costly federal investigations of these matters, including the instant investigation, neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation," Durham wrote in the report.
Since the FBI's investigation began in 2016, allegations of misconduct by the agency about the Trump-Russia collusion probe were made. After the accusations came to light, then-Attorney General Bill Barr appointed Durham as special counsel in 2019 to oversee an investigation of the probe.
After three years, the Barr-appointed special counsel concluded that, in his opinion, the "speed and manner" in which the FBI opened a full investigation was ill-advised and not based on the merit of evidence collected at that time.
"The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election inference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign," Durham's report continued.
"FBI records prepared by Strzok in February and March 2017 show at the time of opening Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI had no information in its holding indicating that any time during the campaign anyone in the Trump campaign had been in contact with any Russian intelligence officials," the report noted.
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Durham's scathing report also noted failures by the FBI during the investigation's early days, including relying on the infamous unvetted Steele dossier, which was prepared by British spy Christopher Steele.
"Our investigation determined that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting," Durham wrote of the FBI allegedly blinding supporting the dossier.
Durham also noted that Steele's main informant Igor Danchenko was "unable to provide any corroborating evidence to support the Steele allegations."
