Special Counsel John Durham Releases Final Report

05.15.23 | 5:57 pm

FILE - This 2018 portrait released by the U.S. Department of Justice shows Connecticut's U.S. A... FILE - This 2018 portrait released by the U.S. Department of Justice shows Connecticut's U.S. Attorney John Durham. Attorney General William Barr has given extra protection to the prosecutor he appointed to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation, giving him the authority of a special counsel to allow him to complete his work without being easily fired. Barr told The Associated Press on Dec. 1, 2020, that he appointed Durham as a special counsel in October under the same federal statute that governed special counsel Robert Mueller’s in the Russia probe. (U.S. Department of Justice) MORE LESS

Read the report here:

John Durham, the special counsel who has spent five years on a bogus search for wrongdoing in the Trump-Russia investigation, released his report this afternoon.

Durham provided a copy of the report to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday. Garland then sent the report to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate judiciary committees.

Attorney General Bill Barr appointed Durham in 2019 after the Mueller investigation concluded. He brought three prosecutions while special counsel; the first one ended in a guilty plea, while the other two ended in not guilty verdicts at trial.

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Josh Kovensky is an investigative reporter for Talking Points Memo, based in New York. He previously worked for the Kyiv Post in Ukraine, covering politics, business, and corruption there.

Includes:

A reminder how much of a bad faith failure the Durham investigation has been (gift article):

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/26/us/politics/durham-trump-russia-barr.html?unlocked_article_code=LWj1zHKy0SyVOnVmHGZZTBnPygUVC4mFJQPhm0RZpCXGpdV3vDiDYid7xsrDLY-To5f4cMM0-B8u-yv9xY4KJu4KRt2qVA3tGfRwGyKoRM-E22QVAnU6PT3qmK657XbvxhZlnJIrxD-8n7P5wyn36R1DJ5v_cj2MXu6tNcTeyyWMBWGA8Tuv398Vw1moh4iUu__phmh0LB7Oyfy_y2ZflwNUk-oTISc419fQE0f5YCI9mwfJGjGDiQeKrEEh5fttx6Gp2enYskSvXfPfbKaGPBXpx9OhEf9O61EmIGrD-xl3GUeZfw1bMKw93xGcTdxZyFrbzwz14qWLLNFasCcPN-gLg_bN-w&smid=url-share

Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.

Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.

There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)

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Notable Replies

lestatdelc says:

May 15, 2023

What’s the under/over it “finds” nothing?

It finds nothing but makes it sound otherwise?

It actually finds something substantive?
brian512 says:

May 15, 2023

To no one’s surprise, he didn’t have the mother wit to just slink away quietly and hope everybody just sort of forgot about him. Obscurity is now his best-case scenario.
noonm says:

May 15, 2023
A reminder how much of a bad faith failure the Durham investigation has been (gift article):

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/26/us/politics/durham-trump-russia-barr.html?unlocked_article_code=LWj1zHKy0SyVOnVmHGZZTBnPygUVC4mFJQPhm0RZpCXGpdV3vDiDYid7xsrDLY-To5f4cMM0-B8u-yv9xY4KJu4KRt2qVA3tGfRwGyKoRM-E22QVAnU6PT3qmK657XbvxhZlnJIrxD-8n7P5wyn36R1DJ5v_cj2MXu6tNcTeyyWMBWGA8Tuv398Vw1moh4iUu__phmh0LB7Oyfy_y2ZflwNUk-oTISc419fQE0f5YCI9mwfJGjGDiQeKrEEh5fttx6Gp2enYskSvXfPfbKaGPBXpx9OhEf9O61EmIGrD-xl3GUeZfw1bMKw93xGcTdxZyFrbzwz14qWLLNFasCcPN-gLg_bN-w&smid=url-share
Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.

Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.

There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)
chezzer14 says:

May 15, 2023

Dear John -

You failed. Fuck off and flee my life forever.

Never yours,

Everyone
machoneman says:

May 15, 2023

Oh, many allegations, inferences, sly innuendos, false statements…but zero indictments, eh?

John, you were an unwitting pawn in the hands of many R’s.

And you fell for it! Dumbshit!

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