John Durham to publicly testify on report detailing FBI bias in Trump-Russia probe
WASHINGTON — Special counsel John Durham will testify publicly to Congress next month to describe his final report detailing bias in the FBI’s investigation of claims that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia.
Durham will appear on June 21 before the House Judiciary Committee, panel spokesman Russell Dye confirmed to The Post on Friday.
Durham’s final report, released May 15, declared that the bureau’s probe into whether the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to win the 2016 election was “seriously flawed” and that “the FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship.”
The special counsel is likely to take heat from both sides when he appears at the Capitol.
Congressional Republicans expressed outrage and confusion about the fact that many key figures in the investigation, including former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and former FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok, declined to be interviewed by Durham and were not compelled to do so.
Democrats, meanwhile, described Durham’s report, which recommended no new criminal charges, as proof that the bureau’s actions weren’t as bad as Trump and his allies say — and are likely to underscore that messaging.
Durham, a former US attorney for Connecticut, issued a blistering condemnation of FBI actions in the Trump investigation, writing that officials demonstrated 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,” his report says.
The FBI’s leaky investigation began in the summer of 2016 and continued under special counsel Robert Mueller through more than half of Trump’s term in office.
It ended in April 2019 after a constant trickle of leaks to the media creating the impression of damning evidence against Trump.
The Mueller probe, however, ultimately found no evidence of a conspiracy.
Durham is likely to be pressed on loose threads of his own investigation, including the role of 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in circulating allegations of a Trump-Russia conspiracy.
Clinton’s campaign financed a gossip-filled dossier by ex-UK spy Christopher Steele that later was used by the FBI to get wiretap orders against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, without disclosure of Clinton’s role to the court.
“[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,” Durham’s 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.”
The special counsel also confirmed that senior officials, including then-President Barack Obama and the leaders of the FBI and CIA, knew about a claim that Clinton engineered the controversy to distract from hacked emails showing her work with Democratic Party leaders to crush left-wing Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid.
The CIA received information that Clinton signed off on a plot on July 26, 2016, “to stir up a scandal against … Trump by tying him to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.” But Durham faulted the FBI’s pursuit of that angle.
On Aug. 3, 2016, the allegation was briefed to Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Comey by then-CIA Director John Brennan.
Durham wrote that his team was “unable to determine precisely when the FBI first obtained any of the details of the Clinton Plan intelligence (other than Director Corney, who attended the August 3, 2016 briefing).”
What to know about the bombshell Durham report
Special counsel John Durham completed a four-year review of the FBI’s investigation of allegations that Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russia
Durham found the FBI’s probe was “seriously flawed” and had no basis in evidence, according to a 306-page report released Monday.
The special prosecutor found that FBI officials “discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia.”
Durham also found investigators put too much faith in information provided by Trump’s political opponents and carried out surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page without genuinely believing there was probable cause to do so.
Despite the scathing findings, Durham did not recommend criminal prosecutions or widespread FBI reforms, writing that “the answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old.”
Durham’s investigation lasted more than four years, longer than the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe itself.
“It appears, however, that this occurred no later than August 22, 2016,” Durham wrote. “On that date, an FBI cyber analyst … emailed a number of FBI employees, including Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten and Section Chief [Jonathan] Moffa, the most senior intelligence analysts on the Crossfire Hurricane team, to provide an update on Russian intelligence materials. The email included a summary of the contents of the Clinton Plan intelligence. The Office did not identify any replies or follow-up actions taken by FBI personnel as a result of this email.”
Durham wrote that the FBI’s apparent non-investigation of claims about Clinton conjuring up the scandal “stands in sharp contrast to its substantial reliance on the uncorroborated Steele Reports, which at least some FBI personnel appeared to know was likely being funded or promoted by the Clinton campaign.”
The report also noted that Trump and his campaign weren’t given an FBI “defensive briefing” about the possibility of Russian infiltration — unlike Clinton, whose team got a defensive briefing in 2015 when the FBI found out a different foreign government sought to send an agent to contribute to her campaign and “gain influence.”
Clinton denied manufacturing the Trump-Russia controversy and blamed the Kremlin for the allegation in a May 2022 interview with the special counsel’s team, the report said.
“Clinton stated it was ‘really sad,’ but ‘I get it, you have to go down every rabbit hole,’” Durham wrote. “She said that it ‘looked like Russian disinformation to me; they’re very good at it, you know.’ Clinton advised that she had a lot of plans to win the campaign, and anything that came into the public domain was available to her.”
Durham was tapped in 2019 by Attorney General Bill Barr to examine the Trump-Russia probe and given special counsel authority in October 2020 so that he could complete his review regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, which Trump lost to Biden.
