The Durham Report, explained

It's complicated.

(John Durham)

On Tuesday, after more than four years, special counsel John Durham released his report on the origins of the FBI’s 2016 counter-intelligence investigation — aka “Crossfire Hurricane” — into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

The report’s arrival was greeted in the most predictable fashion possible given our current politics. Republicans touted it as evidence that Donald Trump had been unfairly targeted by the FBI — as part of a broader Deep State conspiracy. Democrats dismissed it as sound and fury signifying nothing.

So, which is it? To understand that, we should start from the beginning.

In May 2019, Durham, at the time the U.S. Attorney from Connecticut, was appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr to look into the “origins of the Russia investigation and determine if intelligence collection involving the Trump campaign was ‘lawful and appropriate,’” according to sources who spoke to the Associated Press at the time.

That appointment grew from allegations by then President Donald Trump that, among other things, his campaign has been spied on during the course of the 2016 campaign and that he was the subject of targeted harassment by the federal bureaucracy.

“Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State,” Trump tweeted in 2018. “They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before! What goes around, comes around!”

The Durham appointment came just a month after Barr told Congress that he believed “spying did occur” on the Trump campaign.

And it came just two months after special counsel Robert Mueller released the findings of his two-year long look into whether Russia sought to influence the 2017 campaign.

Among Mueller’s conclusions:

• Russia did seek to influence the outcome of the election to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton

• There was no direct collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians — even though the Trump campaign did benefit from negative information pushed by Russia

• Whether the Trump campaign worked to obstruct the investigation was not proven. “(I)f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,” wrote Mueller. “Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

The entirety of the Mueller investigation led to charges against 37 defendants, seven guilty pleas and one conviction at trial.

Now, back to the Durham probe.

Trump quickly seized on it as the supposed key to exposing the Deep State conspiracy against him. He repeatedly predicted that the probe would uncover the “crime of the century.”

But as 2020 dragged on — and Barr warned Republican members of Congress that the report might not be ready until after the election, Trump grew disenchanted, with Barr and Durham.

“If that’s the case I think it’s terrible,” Trump said of the delayed report in October 2020. “It’s very disappointing. And I’ll tell [Barr] to his face….I think it’s a disgrace. It’s an embarrassment.”

At that point, Durham had secured a single guilty plea from a former FBI lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith. Clinesmith pleaded guilty to altering an email that was used to justify the FBI surveillance of one-time Trump adviser Carter Page. He never served a day in jail.

On December 1, 2020 — as Trump was on his way out of the White House — Barr appointed Durham as special counsel, a move designed to ensure that Durham could continue his work to its conclusion even once Joe Biden became president.

“The best thing to do would be to appoint [Durham] under the same regulation that covered Bob Mueller, to provide Durham and his team some assurance that they’d be able to complete their work regardless of the outcome of the election,” explained Barr at the time.

Durham’s probe continued on — but was beset by setbacks, in particular losses on two cases that he brought to trial.

In May 2022, Michael Sussman, a cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was found not guilty of lying to the FBI in regards a tip he shared about a possible connection between Russia and the Trump campaign.

As the New York Times reported of the acquittal:

The verdict was a significant blow to the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration three years ago to scour the Trump-Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.

But Mr. Durham has yet to fulfill expectations from Mr. Trump and his supporters that he would uncover and prosecute a “deep state” conspiracy against the former president. Instead, he has developed only two cases that led to charges: the one against Mr. Sussmann and another against a researcher for the so-called Steele dossier, whose trial is set for later this year.

That second trial — again brought by Durham — was of Igor Danchenko, who was the primary researcher on the Steele dossier, a document containing a variety of claims about Trump’s ties to Russia.

In October 2022, Danchenko was acquitted on four counts of lying to the FBI about one of his sources for the dossier.

Again, the Times:

The verdict was a final blow to the politically charged criminal investigation by John H. Durham, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr three years ago to scour the F.B.I.’s inquiry into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia for any wrongdoing.

Mr. Trump and his supporters had long insisted the Durham inquiry would prove a “deep state” conspiracy against him, but despite pursuing various such claims, Mr. Durham never charged any high-level government officials.

All of which brings us to Monday afternoon — and the final release of the Durham report, which had been four years in the making.

Here’s how CNN covered the main news out of the report:

Special counsel John Durham concluded that the FBI should never have launched a full investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election, according to a report compiled over three years by the Trump-administration appointee and released on Monday.

Durham’s 300-plus page report also states that the FBI used “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” to launch the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump and Russia but used a different standard when weighing concerns about alleged election interference regarding Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The special counsel, however, did not recommend any new charges against individuals or “wholesale changes” about how the FBI handles politically charged investigations, despite strongly criticizing the agency’s behavior.

It’s worth noting here that a 2019 Justice Department inspector general’s report reached the opposite conclusion about the origins of “Crossfire Hurricane.”

According to the Associated Press about that report: “The FBI was justified in opening its investigation into ties between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia and did not act with political bias.”

Aside from that considerable disagreement, the inspector general report found many of the same flaws in the original investigation that the Durham report included — a fact that Democrats used to suggest that Durham’s findings were effectively old news.

(Sidebar: As a result of the IG investigation the FBI said it was taking “more than 40 actions aimed at fixing some of the bureau’s most fundamental operations, such as applying for surveillance warrants and interacting with confidential sources.”)

What then to make of the Durham report? There’s stuff in it for both sides to drive their preferred point of view on it.

For Republicans, the finding that the FBI should never have opened the investigation and that “at least on the part of certain personnel intimately involved in the matter” there was “a predisposition to open an investigation into Trump” will be the focus.

"WOW! After extensive research, Special Counsel John Durham concludes the FBI never should have launched the Trump-Russia Probe,” Trump himself wrote on his Truth Social website on Monday. “In other words, the American Public was scammed."

For Democrats, the fact that the entire Durham probe led to a single guilty plea — and no one served a single day in jail (“not every injustice or transgression amounts to a criminal offense,” Durham wrote in his report) is all the evidence they need that this probe, which cost upwards of $6.5 million, was much less than promised.

In terms of politics, the probe’s conclusion likely strengthens Trump’s case to the Republican base that he has been unfairly victimized by an out of control Deep State. But, most of them already believed that so…

The impact on the general election in 2024 seems minimal — at least at this point.