Special counsel who hunted a deep state conspiracy presents muted findings
John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel who spent four years conducting a politically charged investigation into the Russia investigation, told lawmakers Wednesday that FBI officials had shown a confirmation bias — even as he defended his work against Democratic accusations that he is a partisan tool.
In a hearing of nearly six hours before the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Durham rarely offered new information, repeatedly saying he would not go beyond his report. That approach echoed a 2019 appearance before the same committee by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the investigation of possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.
The hearing could well be the latest – at least official – chapter in the complex saga of the Russia investigation and former President Donald J. Trump’s repeated attempts to reframe it as a deep-state conspiracy, which a source of turbulence in American politics. live longer than six years. Mr Durham retired after completing his report last month, and Senate Democrats have not invited him to testify.
For years, Mr. Trump and his allies harbored an expectation that Mr. Durham would find a conspiracy lurking in the origins of the Russia investigation and prosecute senior officials. But Mr. Durham developed only two peripheral cases, both of which ended in acquittals, citing flaws in the FBI’s early investigative steps that he attributed to confirmation bias.
“There were identified, documented, significant failures of a highly sensitive, unique investigation conducted by the FBI,” Mr Durham said. “The research clearly shows that decisions that have been made have been made in one direction. If there was anything inconsistent with the idea that Trump was involved in a well-coordinated conspiracy with the Russians, that information was largely dismissed or ignored.”
The hearing was largely a predictable display of partisanship, with each side exchanging claims about the merits of the underlying investigation into Russia’s attempt to rig the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. Mr. Mueller documented numerous ties between Russia and Trump campaign officials, but did not accuse any Trump associate of a criminal conspiracy with Russia.
Republicans railed against the Russia investigation as unwarranted and portrayed it as politically motivated and corrupt, focusing on flawed wiretaps and text messages in which FBI officials expressed hostility to Trump.
Democrats defended it as legitimate and necessary by turning to the substance of Mr. Mueller’s work. Not only did he indict countless Russians — and win convictions from multiple Trump associates for other crimes — but he also discovered how the Trump campaign chairman had shared internal polling and strategy with a Russian and Ukrainian political adviser whom the administration claimed was a Russian intelligence agent. among other things.
For large parts of the hearing, Mr Durham served as a foil to both ends, as legislators on both sides asked questions designed to confirm whatever facts or allegations they wanted to highlight.
Much of his own criticism of the investigation was familiar territory. The most factually substantiated parts — specifically errors and omissions in a series of eavesdropping applications that relied in part on allegations in the so-called Steele dossier, a questionable compendium of what turned out to be opposition research funded indirectly by the Clinton campaign — echoed a December report 2019 from the Inspector General of the Ministry of Justice. Mr Durham reiterated those findings, but did not make concrete new suggestions for reform.
Other parts were more fleeting. After Mr. Durham’s initial attempt to find misuse of intelligence at the heart of the Russia investigation came to naught, he turned to looking for a basis to blame the Clinton campaign. He used court documents and his report to insinuate that the campaign was designed to defraud the FBI and frame Mr. Trump, though he never charged any such conspiracy. However, some Republicans took that idea for granted.
“What role did the Clinton campaign play in this hoax?” asked Rep. Tom McClintock, Republican of California, adding, “What exactly was the ‘Clinton Plan?'”
But some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters expressed disappointment that Mr. Durham failed to live up to greater expectations that he would jail senior officials and prove a deep state conspiracy.
Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, for instance, insisted suspicions of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia arose as a result of an operation by Western intelligence agencies — a conspiracy theory that Mr. Durham tried to prove but found no evidence to support. . Mr. Gaetz said Mr. Durham had let the country down and compared the special counsel’s investigation to the Washington Generals, the basketball team whose job it is to lose in exhibition games against the Harlem Globetrotters.
“If you’re part of the cover-up, Mr. Durham, it makes our job harder,” Mr. Gaetz said.
Mr Durham replied that Mr Gaetz’s comments were “offensive”.
But while most Republicans on the committee welcomed Mr. Durham more warmly, he didn’t always say things that supported their position. Mr. Durham called Mr. Mueller a “patriot” and did not contradict any of his findings. He said Russia did indeed interfere in the 2016 election — and characterized that intelligence operation as a “significant threat”.
Pressured by Representative Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, to go beyond his report’s conclusion that FBI agents had acted with “confirmation bias” and accuse them in his testimony of taking steps motivated by politics favoritism, protested Mr. Durham and said that “it’s hard to get into someone else’s head.”
And he said the FBI had “an affirmative duty” to open some sort of investigation into the allegation that served as the basis for the Russian investigation — an Australian diplomat said a Trump campaign adviser made a comment suggesting that the campaign knew in advance that Russia would anonymously dump hacked Democratic emails.
Yet he also testified that “in my opinion” that information did not amount to “a legitimate basis for opening as a full investigation” and that the agency should have opened it as a lower investigation, such as an “assessment” or a “preliminary investigation.” . That went a little further than his report, which argued that it would have been better to open the investigation at a lower level.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz concluded in 2019 that the same information was sufficient basis to open a “full” counterintelligence investigation.
During the hearing, Democrats urged Mr. Durham to acknowledge or explain certain findings from a New York Times article in January that examined how his investigation was confounded by internal disagreements and ethical disputes.
For example, they asked him why his longtime deputy, Nora R. Dannehy, resigned from his team in September 2020. The Times reported that she did so in protest after disputes over the prosecution’s ethics, including the drafting of a possible interim report ahead of the 2020 Election.
Mr Durham spoke highly of Ms Dannehy but declined to say why she had resigned. He called the Times article “without sources,” but did not deny the findings, adding, “Insofar as The New York Times ran an article suggesting certain things, it is what it is.”
Representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat of California, asked Mr. Durham whether it was true, as the Times also reported, that Italian officials denied it when he and Attorney General William P. Barr traveled to Italy to pursue a particular pro-Trump conspiracy theory. but passed on a tip about unrelated financial crimes linked to Mr. Trump.
Mr Barr decided the allegation, the details of which remain unclear, was too serious to ignore, but he ordered Mr Durham to investigate and did not press charges, The Times reported.
“The question is beyond the scope of what I feel I am competent to discuss – it is not part of the report,” Mr. Durham, but he added: ‘I can tell you this. That investigative steps were taken, grand jury subpoenas were issued and it came to nothing.”