‘Uncorroborated intelligence’: Durham Report torches FBI, DOJ for handling of Trump-Russia probe

ARJUN SINGH

The Daily Caller Contributor

Special Counsel John Durham found that the FBI used “uncorroborated intelligence” when launching its probe into former President Donald Trump, and that FBI agents failed to maintain “strict fidelity to the law” in their investigation, according to a copy of the report obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. Durham, appointed to investigate political bias by the FBI in its investigation of President Donald Trump, wrote that “neither U.S. nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement” of the investigation.

“Our investigation determined that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting,” the report read.

Durham added that the FBI

“failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law.” Durham also claimed that the investigation into Trump was continued even after “the Director of the FBI and others learned of significant and potentially contrary intelligence,” according to the report.

The report noted that the FBI received intelligence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign approved “a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” specifically one that involved “tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee” to distract the public from her email scandals. It notes that President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director James Comey were personally briefed on Clinton’s scheme, known as the “Clinton Plan” in the report, by CIA Director John Brennan, who recorded mentioning the plan in his handwritten notes.

The “Clinton Plan” was obtained by the FBI while it was relying on the “Steele Dossier,” a discredited report of lurid allegations of Trump’s personal sexual activity, which the FBI knew was being funded and promoted by the Clinton campaign, according to the report.

Durham quotes information from a meeting between the Dossier’s author, former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, and FBI agents, as well as texts between FBI officials, to demonstrate that the agents knew the evidence was connected to Clinton.

Front line agents who were conducting the investigation were not provided with the intelligence of the “Clinton Plan” by FBI leadership, with some only learning of it when interviewed by Durham’s office.

By contrast, top Clinton campaign officials denied that the material existed, with Campaign Chairman John Podesta and Senior