you really are pretty entertaining. btw, take a 2nd look at the date and the article that you linked to from the ABA. Read it. I'll give you a hint, it's referring to Bill Barr's memo that was so egrigeous in its interpretation of the report that Mueller himself came forward to refute it and then appeared before Congress to testify.
From CAFE: Asha Rangappa - Why The Durham Report Failed
https://cafe.com/notes-from-contributor ... -165449494
'Special Counsel John Durham finally delivered his conclusions after four years of “investigating the investigators” of the FBI’s counterintelligence case on Russia’s 2016 election interference, Crossfire Hurricane. The 306-page report was required to be produced to the Attorney General under the special counsel regulations, and the AG had the discretion to make the report public. There was no debate here about whether AG Garland would release this report – if he had not done so, conspiracy theories would have filled the information vacuum. It’s a good thing it’s public, though, because having to show his homework forced Durham to reveal that his sprawling investigation was as desperate on the inside as it seemed from the outside.
Officially, Durham, who was appointed by former AG Bill Barr in May 2019, was named as a Special Counsel to investigate whether “any federal official, employee, or any other person or entity violated the law in connection with the intelligence, counter-intelligence, or law enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns, individuals associated with those campaigns, and individuals associated with the administration of President Donald J. Trump, including but not limited to Crossfire Hurricane and the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III.” That’s a pretty sweeping mandate, and Trump and his supporters promised that by the end of Durham’s probe, roughly half of the FBI would be rounded up and sent to Gitmo. Instead, Durham ended up charging two random individuals unconnected to the FBI with making false statements and lost both cases. (I wrote about one here – and the other one was simply not worth wasting ink on, to be honest.)
What Durham was really expected to conclude, though, was that the entire Crossfire Hurricane investigation was improperly predicated – meaning, it shouldn’t have been opened in the first place. Such a finding would taint the entire investigation and everything that followed from it – including the appointment of Mueller, who continued the case after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. It would also taint the convictions of the individuals who Mueller convicted of lying to the FBI or Congress on Trump’s behalf, like George Papadapoulos, Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone, and justify Trump’s subsequent pardon of them. Rather inconveniently, however, just a few months after Durham started his probe the Justice Department’s Inspector General, Michael E. Horowitz, released his report into Crossfire Hurricane, which found several flaws in the FISA application for Carter Page but concluded that the basis for the investigation was proper. Specifically, Horowitz determined that the investigation was grounded in a tip provided by the Australian government that Papadapoulos had advance knowledge that Russia would release hacked emails from the DNC, and had bragged about it. (For those who have been following along, we already knew this from the Mueller Report.)
This, of course, didn’t stop Durham from barreling full speed ahead. After first trying, unsuccessfully, to get Horowitz to change his conclusion in the OIG report, Durham publicly stated at the outset of his investigation that he did not believe there was a proper basis for Crossfire Hurricane. His entire report is centered around that preordained conclusion. The report is, overall, a rambling mess, but basically Durham focuses on the Australian tip in a vacuum, concluding that it was very “thin” evidence and was not enough, without further corroboration, to open a full investigation into whether Russia was trying to recruit individuals from the Trump campaign. Durham also unearthed a report from the Intelligence Community comprised of “Russian intelligence analysis” (meaning, from Russian sources) indicating that Hillary Clinton had a plan to “stir up a scandal” against Trump “by tying him to Putin.” Durham notes that the IC did not know whether the intelligence was accurate or even potential Russian disinformation. Nevertheless, Durham dubs this one piece of intelligence “the Clinton Campaign Plan” and uses this as a basis to compare the FBI’s handling of Clinton to Trump. According to Durham, the FBI did not treat Russian intelligence about the Clinton Campaign Plan similarly to how it treated the information it received about Russia’s possible targeting of the Trump campaign. Moreover, the FBI’s failure to question the information received about Trump’s campaign as itself potentially part of the Clinton Campaign Plan reflected, in Durham’s view, the FBI’s confirmation bias against Trump. (Both of Durham’s failed prosecutions were vehicles to promote the theory that the Clinton campaign had lured the FBI into opening the Russia investigation.)
So let’s unpack all of that.
First, investigators don’t operate in a vacuum. At the time that the FBI received the tip from the Australian government, it knew that the DNC server had been hacked, and had attributed that breach to Russia. Trump, for his part, was making very explicit overtures to Russia in downplaying the threat it posed to the U.S., expressing admiration for Putin, and denigrating NATO and our support of Ukraine. (Remember that at the GOP convention, support for Ukraine was significantly diluted in the party platform.) Carter Page, Trump’s foreign policy advisor, had been on the FBI’s radar as a target for Russian intelligence going back to 2013. And Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had been an advisor to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. This raised a legitimate question of whether Russia was targeting individuals in the Trump campaign for recruitment, or had already recruited them.
Second, given this question, the manner in which the FBI explored possible compromise of individuals associated with Trump’s campaign was appropriate. As Durham’s report acknowledges, the main reason that the FBI kept such a close hold on the investigation, and used covert investigative methods like confidential human sources (CHSs), was because it wanted to avoid any leaks that might impact the election. If there was any way that the FBI treated the Trump case differently than Hillary Clinton, it was in concealing the fact that there was any suspicion surrounding the investigation while Trump was able to point to the very open investigation against Clinton as a campaign point. Further, had the FBI taken the steps Durham suggests they should have – like immediately informing the Trump campaign about the tip from Australia or directly questioning Papadapoulos – it not only would have generated public suspicion about the Trump campaign, but would have alerted Russia to the fact that the FBI was investigating its efforts, and allowed it to cover its tracks.
Finally, even if the FBI had done the things Durham says they should have in his report, that would have required opening an investigation! In the FBI, there are, not surprisingly, pretty rigid rules – agents can’t just go out and randomly interview people, for example. There needs to be an investigative reason to do so. Durham understood this, and gets to it on page 295 of his 306-page report. Specifically, Durham’s ultimate objection is not that the investigation into Russian election interference shouldn’t have been opened, it’s that it should have been opened as a “preliminary inquiry” rather than a “full investigation,” and only on George Papadapoulos. The main difference between a PI and an FI is the length of time it can be open and the types of investigative techniques that could be used – a PI is opened based on “information or allegation” of a national security threat versus an FI, which is opened based on “specific and articulable facts.” And a PI can be converted to an FI if circumstances warrant (and clearly would have been, in this case, given the context and what the FBI was uncovering). At best, this is a difference in opinion about the nature and strength of the evidence originally in the FBI’s possession, hardly evidence of rampant illegality.
In the end, Durham’s report omits the fact that Mueller’s investigation resulted in charges against 34 individuals or entities, including indictments against 13 Russian nationals and 3 Russian companies for a conspiracy to defraud the United States, and against 12 Russian GRU officers for hacking into the Democratic National Committee. It fails to mention the numerous contacts between individuals connected to the Kremlin and members of the Trump campaign – contacts which, to a person, were concealed from the Mueller team. It fails to mention that Roger Stone was in private contact with Julian Assange, who ran Wikileaks and conveniently released hacked emails right after the Access Hollywood tape became public. Finally, it fails to mention that a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Republican Senator Marco Rubio, whose “bipartisan report shows unambiguously that members of the Trump campaign cooperated with efforts to get Trump elected,” revealed that Manafort was actively in contact with and passed polling data to a Russian intelligence agent, Konstantin Klimnik – and that information ultimately made its way to Putin.
In short, Durham’s investigation, which reportedly cost taxpayers over $6 million dollars, didn’t change anything about the conclusions contained in the Mueller Report, the charges that came out of it, or the findings of congressional investigations. It did, however, debunk the right-wing claim that the investigation was opened based on the so-called “Steele Dossier,” and it helped remind the public (if they bother to read it) that the entire investigation was originally against Russia, not Trump himself. And perhaps the one useful recommendation that Durham makes – that FISA applications against people connected to political campaigns should have an internal DOJ “devil’s advocate” to help correct for implicit or confirmation bias – is not a bad one. Unfortunately, all of his other conclusions are either ones that have long been corrected for or a product of the same confirmation bias which he rails against. '
Re: Trump was right, it was a Witch hunt:Durham Report
Apparently you have allowed yourself to be ill informed. Robert Mueller's testimony does not agree with you.