#WTH: The Durham Report
It appears the FBI is no longer in the law enforcement biz, & more with Andy McCarthy
Three things from the pod this week with National Review’s Andy McCarthy:
Crossfire Hurricane — the FBI investigation into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — was fueled by the Hillary Clinton campaign, and a desire by senior FBI officials to serve her campaign’s ends. Period.
Repeated instances of lying and the cover-up of clear information discrediting the FBI’s main sources are apparently not “prosecutable” crimes.
The FBI is broken, and the failure to demand accountability in repeated investigations means the Bureau will continue to pursue political vendettas.
Here’s the thing: The investigation into Donald Trump’s putative collusion with the Putin regime is confusing as hell unless you were *deep* into it. The Mueller investigation was also confusing. The Justice Department Inspector General’s investigation was too. Ditto Durham. This isn’t your faithful podcasters’ effort to tell you to ignore these investigations; it’s your faithful podcasters’ way of saying that many people aren’t going to pay too much attention. There are just too many moving parts.
Nevertheless, the major takeaways have been pretty clear from the start, too. Intel that the Clinton campaign was going to try to tie Trump to Russia was so serious that the Director of Central Intelligence walked it into the Oval Office and told President Obama about it himself. Then that information was memory holed because it was so important to defeat Donald Trump. The guy who provided the “evidence”— the Steele dossier — that the FBI took to court to get warrants against Trump campaign officials was a liar. The guy who fabricated most of that “evidence” — Igor Danchenko — was believed to be a Russian spy, a fact that the FBI “forgot” to tell a judge, twice.
There’s lots more here, but apparently, most of it wasn’t actionable by Durham because… a) lying by the FBI is ok; b) lying to a judge to get a warrant is a minor thing; or c) as Queen Elizabeth might have put it, “recollections may differ.” Unsurprisingly, the mainstream press doesn’t care much either. Or, as the New York Times put it, predictably, “After Years of Political Hype, the Durham Inquiry Failed to Deliver.”
For us, the facts Durham brings out are deeply troubling, but it’s the assault on the rule of law is far more disturbing. Think about it this way: Senior FBI officials knew their evidence was “thin” (their words), but pursued a largely fabricated case against a candidate and then President of the United States because, in their minds, he was such a bad guy that the ends justified the lies. Of course, Donald Trump has since worked to validate their claims that he is a danger to the Constitution — denying the results of the 2020 election, seeking to overturn those results, and seeking to suborn his own Vice President to make him the Commander in Chief once again. But he wasn’t a Russian spy, or a Russian agent, ever.
Now imagine to yourself, you are not the President of the United States. You are just John or Jane Q. Public. The FBI, or the IRS, or any other federal agency decides you’re up to no good. Where’s your recourse?
As Marc says in the pod, this is what gives credence to the (false) claims by Trump and others that the “deep state” is lying to you about the results of the 2020 election. Because government officials lied to Congress and to the American people repeatedly, with virtually no consequences. That has resulted in a loss of faith and trust in the government by millions of Americans.
How do we fix this? Leadership. Not more lies. Leadership.
HIGHLIGHTS
Give us some of your takeaways…
AM: I thought [Durham] wouldn't be able to prove any crimes. Part of what I think the downside of the investigation is that it looks like he did identify crimes that were prosecutable, but decided that he didn't have enough evidence to go forward. [F]or example, he concludes that there was a fraud perpetrated on the FISA court. And what I found to be the most frustrating part of it is he basically gets to the bottom line and he says, "Well, the headquarters people say this, and this was their recollection." And of course, he didn't talk to all the headquarters people, which is another baffling aspect of this. And then he says, "The agents on the ground... this is their recollection of it.” And because Steele is a British national, we couldn't compel him to cooperate. And Igor Danchenko was not available to us either. And therefore, even though the FISA court was lied to, we don't have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that we could charge a case based on."
But here, we have a situation where there was a case there to be made and he basically ends up saying, "We looked at this for four years. People's recollections are all over the place. And we couldn't talk to two of the essential witnesses. So we have to punt."
What’s the Danchenko piece of this?
AM: [In the original investigation, when the FBI interviews Danchenko] at the end of January, he tells them that there's nothing to Steele dossier. It's fabricated, it's exaggerated, none of it is reliable. And this is what they relied on in the first two applications for probable cause to get spy warrants. They then go back... first of all, the rules of the FISA court are, once you find out that you have given the court misinformation, you are instantly supposed to go back to the court. You don't wait till the 90-day warrant runs out. You're supposed to go right back to the court and disclose. They not only don't do that when they do go back to the court to get the next warrant, you would think, by the way, that if your investigative theory isn't panning out, what most prosecutors do and investigators do is drop the case.
These guys kept going back to the well, but they tell the court, "We have now interviewed the primary subsource for the guy who wrote the dossier, who wrote the dossier being sealed, the subsource being Danchenko. And we can report to the court that we found Danchenko to be credible." And then they leave it at that. So if you're the judge, you think, "Oh, okay, well if they interviewed the source and he's credible, he must have been credible about the allegations that they've been bringing me." What the FBI doesn't tell the court or apparently the Justice Department is they interviewed the subsource and he was credible. But what he was credible about was that all the allegations that he had been bringing for months were nonsense.
Why didn’t Durham talk to Comey? McCabe? Strzok?
AM: What you're confused about is confusing to me too because at the same time that we're reading this, and there are seemingly essential witnesses who don't get interviewed. I mean, Jim Comey doesn't get interviewed. Andy McCabe doesn't get interviewed. Peter Strzok doesn't get interviewed apparently. I don't know if he interviewed Lisa Page or not. I don't recall that. But at the same time, we're hearing that there's an investigation underway where special counsel has been appointed to look at former President Trump in connection with January 6th stuff and the document retention down at Mar-a-Lago. And they're hauling Vice President Pence into the grand jury. They're hauling everybody into the grand jury. And when asked about it, they say, obviously, these are essential witnesses they have to be spoken to. So, I find that to be a head scratcher. There's nothing that says that you have to interview people. If you think they're going to be uncooperative or they're not going to advance the case, then you don't have to talk to them. But I think most prosecutors think that if you have an essential witness who's available, that you should speak to him.
The thing about this investigation compared to say an inspector general investigation is he's got subpoena power. The inspector general can't subpoena people and can only speak to people who are in the government. He can ask for cooperation, but he can't compel it. Durham had subpoena power
Did anyone pay any price for the Russia collusion lies?
AM: Remember Durham prosecuted three cases, comparatively minor compared to the big scheme here, which was the collusion between the Clinton campaign and the government. But these were false statements cases. One of them was against the FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, who pled guilty and got a slap on the wrist. Unbelievably, in my mind, from... the judge in his case is now the judge who runs the FISA court, James Boasberg gave him the sentence of 12 months of probation. I think an FBI lawyer who doctored a document that was being provided for a sworn application to the FISA court. And it's like a slap on the wrist is probably overstates the seriousness of that sentence under those circumstances.
And then there were two false statements cases that he brought, that Durham brought against Michael Sussmann, who was the Clinton lawyer who brought anti-Trump information data to the FBI, pretending that he was not working for the Clinton campaign at the time. And then the other case was Danchenko. And in the run-up to Danchenko's trial, there were what we call in the biz, motions in limine, which are motions where both sides litigate before trial what's going to be allowed to be presented in front of the jury. And one of the things that came up was how much Durham would be allowed to bring out the fact that there was this prior investigation of Danchenko, so that's where it reared its head.
What about Danchenko?
AM: The FBI is so spun up about the possibility that Danchenko is a Russian asset, that they ask to get FISA coverage on him, to do a FISA warrant just like they did on Carter Page, because he not only goes to Brookings and allegedly offers money for classified information. When the FBI begins to investigate this, they find that he has close connections to two people that they have FISA investigations on who are tied to Russia, and also has been in and out of the Russian embassy in Washington, where he has had meetings with people there as well, presumably sources, and may even have offered to work for Russian intelligence explicitly in that context.
They want to get FISA coverage on him. He's working at Brookings at the time, and while they're assembling the FISA a application, they come to believe that he has gone, that he's left, that he's gone back to Russia. They drop the whole thing. It turns out he hadn't gone back to Russia. They thought maybe he went back for a while, but he was right in Washington under their nose the whole time, and they didn't pursue the FISA. And then it just seems to have dropped into a black hole. And when it emerged that Danchenko was working with Steele, evidently not only did no one go back and instantly do a background check and find this information that they had an unresolved issue with him with respect to whether he was connected to Russian intelligence or not. It seems to me that they go out of their way not to resolve that. And then even worse, they sign him up as a paid informant.
Both the FBI’s behavior and Durham’s pursuit of justice seem like a shitshow…
AM: Yeah, well I think all of this stuff where you're talking about false statements being made to people is all potentially actionable. But then you have to investigate it. And I think what people's frustration is, I know my frustration is, what Durham comes back with is, yeah, we looked at this and we couldn't get to the bottom of it, and we didn't have anyone we could make a case against beyond a reasonable doubt. So we didn't bring the case. And in the meantime, I have to scratch my head because he did bring these cases against Sussman and Danchenko, and we may have talked about them at the time. I didn't see how on earth he was going to get convictions on those cases. These are cases he decided to bring, that I think he had very minimal percentage chance of getting convictions on, not just because they were in Washington, so he was dealing with what would be a hostile jury pool, but also because seemed to me that his theory was duped by the misinformation that was provided, and the more rational interpretation of the evidence was that the FBI was in on it. It was going to be very hard to get a jury to find that the FBI was materially misled such that it affected the way that they conducted their investigation. Because I don't see any evidence of that.
What’s your biggest beef with Durham?
AM: Where I part company Dany, most directly and consequentially with Durham, is I think he's got a benign interpretation, not a flattering one, but a benign interpretation of how the FBI reacted to the disclosure in the intelligence community in July of 2016. That exactly our spies, our spy agencies had insight into Russian intelligence, which I take to mean they somehow they either had a source or they got a FISA intercept or something. But they learned that the Russians were saying that there was a plan of the Clinton campaign, which Hillary had approved. I think they even had a date that they said that she had approved it.
Marc: July 26, 2016.
AM: Right. And that's important I guess. Cause that's just like three days before they opened Crossfire Hurricane, they open it, well maybe five days before. But anyhow, they say that they have this plan, and she approved it and they're trying to smear Trump as a Russian asset. I think there's been a lot of talk about this, which has gotten hung up on nonsense. For example, it really doesn't matter whether the Russians believe this or not, or whether they were just floating it out there because they like to float things out to make us get spun up. To me, that's a side issue. It also doesn't matter if there's really evidence that Hillary at some formal meeting approved this gambit, because it's abundantly obvious that that is exactly what the Clinton campaign was and they acted on it. Whether the Russians believed it or not, and whether they had any hearing meeting about it at the campaign or not, it's very clear that this was the Hillary Clinton campaign plan. And there's tons of evidence of that.
What Durham's criticism of the FBI is, is that when they were evaluating the information they were getting from Steele that they brought to the FISA court, they didn't factor in the reporting about Russian intelligence, and therefore consider the possibility that what they were giving the court was Russian information or misinformation. And I don't, with due respect again to Durham, to my mind that's not what happened here. I don't think they ignored this reporting. I mean this reporting so far as we understand it, it came into some component of the intelligence community, probably the NSA. It was initially given to the CIA, and Brennan who was then the CIA Director is said to have thought it was serious enough that they briefed President Obama, Vice President Biden, Susan Rice, who was the National Security advisor at the time, Sally Yates at the Justice Department, and Comey at the FBI.
I don't think Comey was going to ignore information that came from Brennan and Clapper that they all thought was serious enough to brief Obama on. But the last thingy Comey's going to do is just shrug his shoulders and ignore that. I don't think they ignored this information at all. I think Durham's report makes it very clear that the FBI was intimidated by Hillary Clinton and believed she was going to be the next president, and that there might be reprisals against FBI agents for the investigations of Clinton. They have this vignette in the report where Lisa Page says to Peter Strzok, who's about to go interview Hillary in connection with the Clinton emails scandal, “tread lightly here.” She's going to be the next president, and she's going to take it out on the FBI if we go too hard on them. And you can see that that was their attitude about it in various different iterations of the investigation, including that besides Russiagate, there were apparently at least two other efforts by foreign countries to infiltrate Clinton's campaign, to make illegal campaign donations and the like, and the Bureau basically hand rung for a while and then dropped those investigations.
They decided, let's give her a defensive briefing, because their goal with Clinton was to keep her out of trouble, not to make a case on her. And that was only after doing nothing for months with this information. Whereas with Trump, the minute they got sketchy information, before they even interviewed a witness, they opened up a full investigation on them. It's a very different tact. But I think they were intimidated by Clinton. They thought she was going to be the next president, and that they decided that if her pitch was that Trump was a Putin puppet, they were going with the Putin puppet narrative. And I don't see anything in what Durham found that's inconsistent with that theory of the case.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Important quotes:
“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 interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign.”
“Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the (Justice) Department and FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report.”
“FBI records prepared by [Peter] Strzok in February and March 2017 show that at the time of the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI had no information in its holdings indicating that at any time during the campaign anyone in the Trump campaign had been in contact with any Russian intelligence officials.”
“[P]rior to the submission of the initial Page FISA application, the FBI in fact knew Steele had told Handling Agent-I that Fusion GPS had been hired by a law firm and that his ultimate client was ‘senior Democrats’ supporting Clinton,” the report said. “Moreover, it knew that Handling Agent-I’s notes of this meeting reflect that, according to Steele, ‘HC’ (Hillary Clinton) was aware of his (Steele’s) reporting.”
“In particular, at the direction of Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok opened Crossfire Hurricane immediately. Strzok, at a minimum, had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump. The matter was opened as a full investigation without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information” and that the FBI launched this Trump-Russia investigation without “any significant review of its own intelligence databases” and without “collection and examination of any relevant intelligence from other U.S. intelligence entities.”
”It is the Office’s assessment that the FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia.”
“Similarly, the FBI Inspection Division Report says that the investigators ‘repeatedly ignore[d] or explain[ed] away evidence contrary to the theory the Trump campaign… had conspired with Russia… It appeared that … there was a pattern of assuming nefarious intent,'”
“An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for [the investigation], but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes. Unfortunately, it did not.”
The Durham Report Exposes How Thin the Collusion Case Really Was (National Review, May 20 2023)
No, IG Horowitz Did Not Endorse the FBI’s Predication for the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation (National Review, May 16 2023)
The FBI Didn’t Ignore Russian Intel on Hillary’s Plan to Smear Trump — It Abetted the Plan (National Review, May 16 2023)
The FBI’s Keystone Cops According to John Durham (Heritage, May 19 2023)
FBI Ignored Possibility That Steele Dossier Was Russian Disinformation, Durham Confirms (National Review, May 15 2023)
The Shoddy Russia Investigation (National Review, May 16 2023)
Durham report: FBI displayed 'markedly different' treatment of Clinton, Trump campaigns (Fox, May 15 2023)
Durham report: FBI and DOJ had no proper basis to launch Trump-Russia investigation (Washington Examiner, May 16 2023)
The Durham report is a damning indictment of the FBI – and the media
The Durham Report Finds Bad Apples Have Spoiled the FBI (WSJ, May 17 2023)
Comer and Grassley on FBI Failing to Comply with Subpoena Deadline (Oversight House, May 10 2023)
FBI employees had security clearances revoked after speaking out against 'politicized rot': House report (Fox News, May 18 2023)
House GOP embraces FBI whistleblowers despite bureau yanking clearances over Jan. 6 (Politico, May 18 2023)
· FBI Whistleblower Testifies Bureau ‘May Have’ Had Confidential Human Sources in the Capitol on J6 (National Review, May 18 2023)