Durham, who was chosen by former U.S. Attorney General William Barr to investigate the origins of the investigation during the Trump administration, will testify before the House Intelligence Committee and the House Judiciary Committee; the intelligence committee, however, will meet in secret.
Durham was selected in May 2019 to investigate “Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s 2016 investigation into Trump-Russia collusion and related matters. Barr appointed Durham special counsel in December 2020 to protect the investigation during the transition from former President Donald Trump to President Joe Biden.
Durham completed its roughly four-year investigation last month, and the Justice Department later released its findings in a 306-page report. In order to pursue a partisan investigation against Trump, the FBI strayed from its core mission and guiding principles, as the report paints a troubling picture.
According to the New York Post: “In his final report, Durham said the FBI’s investigation into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with the Kremlin to win the 2016 election was ‘seriously flawed’ and that ‘the FBI dismissed or deliberately ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship.”
When he makes an appearance on Capitol Hill, the special advocate is likely to face criticism from both sides.
Republican members of Congress have expressed outrage and confusion over the refusal of a number of key players in the investigation, including former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and the Former FBI Counterintelligence Chief Peter Strzok, to speak with Durham.
They also expressed concern over Durham’s lack of effort to use the law to compel them to provide depositions. Democrats, meanwhile, claimed Durham’s report — which suggested no new criminal charges — proved the FBI’s actions weren’t as serious as Trump and his supporters had suggested, The Post continued.
Durham criticized the actions of the FBI in choosing to conduct an unprecedented investigation into Trump, one of the leading presidential candidates at the time, despite having no legitimate reason to do so.
“An objective and honest assessment of these news feeds should have caused the FBI to seriously question whether they were being used for political or other purposes, in addition to questioning the assumptions of the investigation. Unfortunately, this does not is not the case, according to his report.
Early in Donald Trump’s presidency, the Justice Department appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller to take over the investigation. However, after two years and major leaks suggesting that Trump would likely be indicted, Mueller ended his investigation.
Durham said in his report that the FBI launched the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump’s campaign “based on raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated intelligence” and that the FBI took the allegations against Trump much more seriously than allegations against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding corruption and improper handling of classified information.
The solution, according to Durham, “is not the formulation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old ones”. If the FBI’s guiding principles of “loyalty, bravery, and integrity” are not ingrained in the hearts and minds of those who have sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States and protect the American people, then enact more rules and regulations to be learned in even more training sessions will probably prove to be a useless exercise.
On July 26, 2016, the CIA learned that Clinton had consented to a scheme “to stir up a scandal against…Trump by linking him to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the Russian Hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”
According to The Post, Durham criticized the FBI for taking this approach.