After four years of working out of the public eye, special counsel John Durham arrived to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on the morning of June 21 about the findings of his long-anticipated report.
Republicans applauded the report, released to the public on May 15, as a vindication of former President Donald Trump’s claim that he had been unfairly targeted by the FBI and others in the federal government as part of its investigation into allegations that Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election.
Durham’s report marked the end of a seven-year saga of probes, investigations, and allegations against Trump and his allies that began in 2016 following the WikiLeaks release of thousands of emails from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
The FBI investigation into Trump and his associates began on July 31, 2016 with a probe into the potential role Trump associate George Papadopoulos played in the WikiLeaks document dump. This probe, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane” by the FBI, sought to establish whether the Trump campaign had played any role in the leak, and stemmed from a conversation Papadopoulos had had with an Australian official in a London bar on May 6 of that year.
Eventually, the FBI probe was transferred to special counsel Robert Mueller, a former director of the FBI. On April 18, 2019 Mueller’s report was released to the public, but it “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
After Mueller’s report was released, then-Attorney General William Barr placed Durham in charge of another investigation to look into the origins of Crossfire Hurricane and the investigation of Trump’s associates.
Durham’s report concluded that no collusion with Russia took place, vindicating Trump’s long repeated claims that the Russia investigation was a “hoax.”
The claim that Trump colluded with Russia was found to have originated with Clinton amid the fallout of her email scandal as part of an effort to shield her campaign from that scandal, where Clinton was found to have held classified government information on a private server.
Durham highlighted the distinct approach the FBI took to intelligence it received from a trusted foreign source indicating that the Clinton campaign planned to smear Trump by tying him to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Clinton campaign’s goal, the intelligence said, was to divert attention from the scandal concerning Clinton’s use of an unauthorized private server to transmit top-secret government emails.
By Joseph Lord
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