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    Pence Won’t Face Charges in Classified Documents Inquiry

    The Justice Department informed the former vice president of its decision days before he was expected to announce his campaign for president.The Justice Department has declined to pursue charges against former Vice President Mike Pence in its investigation into his retention of classified documents at his home in Indiana, informing him in a brief letter on Thursday night, according to three people familiar with the situation.Word that the case would be closed came days before Mr. Pence, 63, was set to announce his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in Iowa.The F.B.I. and the Justice Department’s national security division “conducted an investigation into the potential mishandling of classified information,” the department wrote to Mr. Pence’s lawyer, according to a person who had read the letter. Based on the results of that investigation, “no criminal charges will be sought,” that person said.The decision served as a reminder of an enormously consequential plotline that remains unresolved as the 2024 election season gets underway.The most important, by far, is the criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and whether he sought to obstruct the inquiry now led by a special counsel, Jack Smith, after Mr. Trump and his aides repeatedly resisted efforts to return sensitive government documents. President Biden is also under investigation by a special counsel, Robert K. Hur, over the improper retention of materials dating from his eight years as vice president — although Mr. Biden has been far more cooperative with investigators.A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the Pence investigation. But Attorney General Merrick B. Garland did not deem the matter serious enough to appoint a special counsel in the case, as he had done for the investigations into Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, senior law enforcement officials said.For Mr. Pence, a man who has made personal probity — and a determination to defend the rule of law in defiance of Mr. Trump after the 2020 election — the core of his long-shot presidential campaign, the decision represented bittersweet vindication, ending an embarrassing episode that had threatened his reputation.From the start, Mr. Pence and his team cooperated with the authorities, in stark contrast to Mr. Trump, who defied a federal subpoena to return materials stored at his Florida residence and resort, Mar-a-Lago.In January, a lawyer for Mr. Pence voluntarily searched the former vice president’s house in Carmel, Ind., for documents after aides to President Biden discovered sensitive material at an office the president had once occupied in Washington and at his home in Delaware.About a dozen documents with classified markings were “inadvertently boxed and transported” to Mr. Pence’s home, according to one of his aides at the time, and subsequently returned to the National Archives and Records Administration.After the F.B.I. searched his home in February and found one additional classified document, his advisers continued to emphasize his cooperation.“The vice president has directed his legal team to continue its cooperation with appropriate authorities and to be fully transparent through the conclusion of this matter,” his adviser, Devin O’Malley, said then.Mr. Pence and Trump remain in a legal and political tangle resulting from their odd-couple White House partnership.In April, Mr. Pence testified for more than five hours before a federal grand jury in Washington investigating the actions of Mr. Trump and his aides in the days leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He had sought to limit his testimony and avoid appearing, citing the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution to argue that he was protected from legal scrutiny.Mr. Trump unsuccessfully sought to prevent Mr. Pence from discussing their private interactions, citing executive privilege.It is not clear what testimony Mr. Pence provided. But prosecutors were surely interested in Mr. Pence’s account of his interactions with Mr. Trump and Trump advisers including John Eastman, a lawyer who promoted the idea that he could delay or block the congressional certification process on Jan. 6 to give Mr. Trump a chance to remain in office.Mr. Pence’s unwillingness to go along with that plan infuriated Mr. Trump, who assailed his vice president privately and publicly on Jan. 6.He subsequently became a target of the Trump loyalists who stormed the Capitol building that day, with some chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” Someone erected a fake gallows outside the building.Mr. Pence, a former governor of Indiana, faces significant challenges in his bid for the presidency. He trails far behind his former boss and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in the polls, and has made no effort to channel the harder-edged populist energies overtaking the Republican Party.Instead, he is expected to pitch himself as a “classical conservative” who would return his party to its Reagan-era brand of mainstream conservatism. He is also likely to appeal to evangelicals, adopting a hard-line position in support of a federal abortion ban and promoting free trade and government regulations. More

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    Trump White House Aides Subpoenaed in Firing of Election Security Expert

    The special counsel is scrutinizing the dismissal of Christopher Krebs, who contradicted baseless claims by the former president that the 2020 election was marred by fraud.The special counsel investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election has subpoenaed staff members from the Trump White House who may have been involved in firing the government cybersecurity official whose agency judged the election “the most secure in American history,” according to two people briefed on the matter.The team led by the special counsel, Jack Smith, has been asking witnesses about the events surrounding the firing of Christopher Krebs, who was the Trump administration’s top cybersecurity official during the 2020 election. Mr. Krebs’s assessment that the election was secure was at odds with Mr. Trump’s baseless assertions that it was a “fraud on the American public.”Mr. Smith’s team is also seeking information about how White House officials, including in the Presidential Personnel Office, approached the Justice Department, which Mr. Trump turned to after his election loss as a way to try to stay in power, people familiar with the questions said.The investigators appear focused on Mr. Trump’s state of mind around the firing of Mr. Krebs, as well as on establishing a timeline of events leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021. The latest subpoenas, issued roughly two weeks ago, went to officials in the personnel office, according to the two people familiar with the matter.Mr. Krebs enraged Mr. Trump when his agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, released a statement nine days after the 2020 election attesting to the security of the results. The statement added a sharp rebuke — in boldface type — to the unfounded conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump and his allies were spreading about compromised voting machines.“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised,” the statement from Mr. Krebs’s agency read.Five days later, Mr. Trump tweeted that Mr. Krebs was “terminated” after releasing a “highly inaccurate” statement about the 2020 election.Mr. Krebs later testified to the House special committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that before his firing, he was aware of “skepticism” among Trump allies about his “loyalty to the president.”It was far more than skepticism. Within the Presidential Personnel Office, a small group of Trump loyalists, led by Mr. Trump’s former personal aide, John McEntee, were on a mission to find and fire people perceived as disloyal to Mr. Trump within the federal bureaucracy. And they had fingered the outspoken Mr. Krebs, who had been appointed by Mr. Trump himself, as among the ranks of the disloyal.Staff members within the personnel office had drafted a document about Mr. Krebs that outlined reasons to distrust him. The memo, first reported by Jonathan Karl of ABC News, detailed a litany of Mr. Krebs’s alleged sins against Mr. Trump, including: “Wife posted a family photo on Facebook with the ‘Biden Harris’ logo watermarked at the bottom.”Mr. Smith’s team is asking witnesses about broader efforts made by Mr. Trump’s personnel officials to test the loyalty of federal officials and potential hires, the people briefed on the matter said. Mr. McEntee was seen going into the grand jury in recent months.Months before the 2020 election, Mr. McEntee, now the head of a dating app for conservatives, and a deputy sought to overhaul the government’s hiring process. They developed what became known by some officials as “the loyalty test” — a new questionnaire for government hires that asked such questions as “What part of Candidate Trump’s campaign message most appealed to you and why?”Mr. Krebs is among those whom Mr. Smith’s team has interviewed, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Krebs declined to comment when contacted.Mr. Smith’s team has also been trying to figure out how the personnel office interacted with the Justice Department as Mr. Trump grasped at any available instrument within his bureaucracy that might help him subvert the 2020 election result.In his final weeks in office, Mr. Trump grew increasingly frustrated with the department’s leaders as one after another rebuffed his pressure on them to falsely declare that large-scale voter fraud had occurred in swing states, such as Georgia, that Mr. Trump had lost to Mr. Biden.By the time the election took place, Heidi Stirrup, a loyalist close to Mr. Trump’s policy adviser, Stephen Miller, had been installed as the White House liaison at the Justice Department. Mr. Smith’s office has asked questions about her role, one of the people briefed on the matter said.Ms. Stirrup was banned from entering the Justice Department building a month after the 2020 election, after she tried to glean sensitive information from department officials about efforts to hunt for election fraud, according to officials with knowledge of the episode.Soon after, Attorney General William P. Barr, whom Mr. Trump had long seen as an ally, resigned after telling Mr. Trump that his election fraud theories were bogus and that the legal team he had assembled to challenge the results was a “clown show.” Jeffrey A. Rosen, who replaced Mr. Barr, also refused to follow Mr. Trump’s orders to use the machinery of the Justice Department to overturn the election.Jeffrey B. Clark, the acting head of the civil division, was the one senior Justice Department official who embraced Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn President Biden’s victory. Mr. Clark had a relatively low profile, but in the frantic period after the election, Mr. Trump identified him as his most important ally inside the department. Mr. Trump seriously considered firing Mr. Rosen and putting Mr. Clark in charge.Justice Department leaders were horrified and pledged to collectively resign. Mr. Trump shelved the plan, but during the past two years has spoken warmly of Mr. Clark and hosted him at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.Mr. Clark has been the focus of investigators’ attention as well in connection with his role in helping Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the election outcome. More

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    Trump Lawyers Seek Meeting With Garland Over Special Counsel Inquiries

    Two lawyers for the former president asserted that he was being treated unfairly in the investigations into his handling of classified documents and his efforts to remain in power.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump sent a letter on Tuesday requesting a meeting with Attorney General Merrick B. Garland related to the special counsel investigations into Mr. Trump’s conduct.The letter cited no specifics but asserted that Mr. Trump was being treated unfairly by the Justice Department through the investigations led by the special counsel, Jack Smith. Mr. Smith is scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s handling of classified material that was discovered at his private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, after his presidency, as well as his efforts to retain power after he lost the 2020 election.There are indications that Mr. Smith is approaching the stage of the investigation where he could start making decisions about whether to seek indictments of Mr. Trump and others in the documents case. The status of his other line of inquiry, into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss and how they contributed to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by his supporters, is less clear.“Unlike President Biden, his son Hunter and the Biden family, President Trump is being treated unfairly,” the lawyers for Mr. Trump, James Trusty and John Rowley, wrote to Mr. Garland.“No president of the United States has ever, in the history of our country, been baselessly investigated in such outrageous and unlawful fashion,” they wrote.They requested a meeting to discuss the “ongoing injustice” by Mr. Smith’s team.The letter was reported earlier by ABC News.A spokesman for Mr. Smith declined to comment.The letter’s tone is markedly different from the approach taken by Mr. Trump shortly after the F.B.I. executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, recovering documents that Mr. Trump had failed to turn over after receiving a subpoena demanding that they be returned to the government. At the time, Mr. Trump, through an intermediary, sent a message to Justice Department officials that the search inflamed the country, and he asked how he could help to lower the temperature.The letter from his lawyers on Tuesday was directly confrontational. It implied that the family of Mr. Biden, who appointed Mr. Garland and who is himself the focus of a special counsel investigation into a far smaller number of classified documents from his vice-presidential and Senate days found in spaces where he worked and in his home, is benefiting from more favorable treatment.Hunter Biden is under separate investigation on possible tax charges and for possibly having lied about his drug use on a federal form he filled out to purchase a handgun.Mr. Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination in an increasingly crowded Republican field. But with the letter, Mr. Trump is relying on a frequently used playbook, in which he suggests a judge or prosecutor is treating him unfairly by the act of investigating him.Most recently, he tried suggesting the judge overseeing an indictment against him in a state court in Manhattan has a conflict because a family member works for Democrats.Seen another way, the letter could be an attempt by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to lay down a marker toward asking Mr. Garland to recuse himself from involvement in whether Mr. Trump faces charges.While Mr. Smith will make the recommendation on whether to charge Mr. Trump with federal crimes in the two cases, a final decision would be made by Mr. Garland. In the documents-related case, prosecutors have examined evidence related to obstruction of justice, as well as to whether he mishandled classified material.Mr. Smith’s team is still hearing from witnesses in the two cases, according to multiple familiar with the activity, although all signs point to the documents investigation nearing its end point.Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have privately predicted that the former president will face charges in the case related to the documents at a minimum, although they maintain he did nothing wrong. They have also grown angry at the number of people who have been subpoenaed, from low-level workers at Mar-a-Lago to former government officials.Mr. Trump is under indictment in New York on charges of paying hush money to a porn star and is facing a separate investigation in Georgia into his efforts to reverse his defeat at the polls there in 2020.It is highly unlikely that Mr. Garland would agree to meet with Mr. Trump’s lawyers, one of the attorney general’s former aides said.“Merrick Garland will not meet with Trusty or any of the other Trump lawyers,” said Anthony Coley, Mr. Garland’s former spokesman. “Jack Smith is running this investigation, not Merrick Garland.”Glenn Thrush More

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    Trump Lawyer Resigns From Defense Team in Special Counsel Inquiries

    Timothy Parlatore, who has been defending the former president in the investigations into classified documents and Jan. 6, is leaving as federal prosecutors appear to be nearing decisions about bringing charges.Timothy Parlatore, one of the lawyers representing former President Donald J. Trump in the federal investigations into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has resigned from the former president’s legal team.In a brief interview on Wednesday, Mr. Parlatore declined to discuss the specific reasons for his departure, but said it was not related to the merits of either inquiry — both of which are being led by a special counsel, Jack Smith. Mr. Parlatore said that he informed Mr. Trump of his decision directly and that he left the legal team on good terms with the former president.His departure was reported earlier by CNN.Mr. Parlatore’s withdrawal from the twin special counsel cases leaves Mr. Trump a lawyer short at a moment when prosecutors under Mr. Smith seem to be nearing the end of their sprawling grand jury investigations and may be approaching a decision about whether to bring charges.Two other lawyers — James Trusty and John Rowley — will for now continue to take the lead in representing Mr. Trump in both of the cases.Mr. Parlatore informed Mr. Trump’s team on Monday that he anticipated withdrawing, according to a person familiar with the events.Since last summer and until recently, Mr. Parlatore played a key role in Mr. Trump’s attempts to use attorney-client and executive privilege to limit the scope of the testimony provided by a series of witnesses who appeared in front of grand juries hearing evidence in both of the matters.Over and over in sealed filings and at closed-door hearings, Mr. Parlatore and his colleagues sought to assert privilege on behalf of Mr. Trump in the hopes of narrowing testimony from top Trump aides like Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff, and former Vice President Mike Pence. But their efforts were almost completely unsuccessful.At one point, Mr. Parlatore himself was subpoenaed to appear in front of the grand jury investigating the documents case. During his appearance, he answered questions about efforts made by Mr. Trump’s legal team to comply with a subpoena issued by the Justice Department last May demanding the return of all classified material in the former president’s possession.Among the things that Mr. Parlatore said he discussed with the grand jury were searches — ordered by a judge in response to a push from the Justice Department — that he oversaw at the end of last year of several properties belonging to Mr. Trump, including Trump Tower in New York; Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J.; and a storage site in West Palm Beach, Fla. During the search of the storage site, investigators found at least two more documents with classified markings.Those searches followed a search in August of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, by the F.B.I., which led to the discovery of more than 100 classified documents that had not been returned in response to the earlier subpoena.Mr. Parlatore was brought on to the legal team by Boris Epshteyn, who had been serving as something of an in-house counsel, hiring and negotiating contracts for lawyers. Mr. Epshteyn has shown a penchant for delivering sunny news to Mr. Trump despite bad circumstances, and for creating a bottleneck for the lawyers in dealing with the client, according to several people familiar with the events.Last month, Mr. Parlatore wrote a letter to Congress asking lawmakers for help in taking the documents investigation away from prosecutors and giving it to the intelligence community — a move that, among other things, would have removed the threat of a criminal indictment against Mr. Trump.The letter also seemed to preview some of Mr. Trump’s potential defenses in the documents case, noting that during his chaotic departure from the White House, aides “quickly packed everything into boxes and shipped them to Florida.” This hasty process, Mr. Parlatore argued, suggested that “White House institutional processes,” not “intentional decisions by President Trump,” were responsible for sensitive material being hauled away.Last week, Mr. Trump appeared to undercut those assertions on live television, declaring at a CNN town hall event that he knowingly removed government records from the White House and claiming that he was allowed to take anything he wanted with him as his personal property.“I took the documents,” he said at the event. “I’m allowed to.” More

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    Analysis: Durham Report Failed to Deliver After Years of Political Hype

    A dysfunctional investigation led by a Trump-era special counsel illustrates a dilemma about prosecutorial independence and accountability in politically sensitive matters.The limping conclusion to John H. Durham’s four-year investigation of the Russia inquiry underscores a recurring dilemma in American government: how to shield sensitive law enforcement investigations from politics without creating prosecutors who can run amok, never to be held to account.At a time when special counsels are proliferating — there have been four since 2017, two of whom are still at work — the much-hyped investigation by Mr. Durham, a special counsel, into the Russia inquiry ended with a whimper that stood in contrast to the countless hours of political furor that spun off from it.Mr. Durham delivered a report that scolded the F.B.I. but failed to live up to the expectations of supporters of Donald J. Trump that he would uncover a politically motivated “deep state” conspiracy. He charged no high-level F.B.I. or intelligence official with a crime and acknowledged in a footnote that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign did nothing prosecutable, either.Predictably, the report’s actual content — it contained no major new revelations, and it accused the F.B.I. of “confirmation bias” rather than making a more explosive conclusion of political bias — made scant difference in parts of the political arena. Mr. Trump and many of his loyalists issued statements treating it as vindication of their claims that the Russia inquiry involved far more extravagant wrongdoing.“The Durham Report spells out in great detail the Democrat Hoax that was perpetrated upon me and the American people,” Mr. Trump insisted on social media. “This is 2020 Presidential Election Fraud, just like ‘stuffing’ the ballot boxes, only more so. This totally illegal act had a huge impact on the Election.”Mr. Trump’s comparison was unintentionally striking. Just as his and his supporters’ wild and invented claims of election fraud floundered in court (Fox News also agreed to pay a $787.5 million settlement for amplifying lies about Dominion Voting Systems), the political noise surrounding Mr. Durham’s efforts ultimately ran up against reality.In that sense, it was less that Mr. Durham failed to deliver and more that Attorney General William P. Barr set him up to fail the moment he assigned Mr. Durham to find evidence proving Mr. Trump’s claims about the Russia investigation.There were real-world flaws with the Russia investigation, especially how the F.B.I. botched applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser. But the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, found those problems, leaving Mr. Durham with depleted hunting grounds.Indeed, credit for Mr. Durham’s only courtroom success, a guilty plea by an F.B.I. lawyer who doctored an email during preparations for a wiretap renewal, belongs to Mr. Horowitz, who uncovered the misconduct.At the same time, Mr. Horowitz kneecapped Mr. Durham’s investigation by finding no evidence that F.B.I. actions were politically motivated. He also concluded that the basis of the Russia inquiry — an Australian diplomat’s tip related to the release of Democratic emails hacked by Russia — was sufficient to open a full investigation.Before Mr. Horowitz released his December 2019 report, Mr. Durham lobbied him to drop that finding, arguing the F.B.I. should have instead opened a preliminary inquiry. When Mr. Horowitz declined, Mr. Durham issued an extraordinary statement saying he disagreed based on “evidence collected to date” in his inquiry.But even as Mr. Durham’s report questioned whether the F.B.I. should have opened it as a lower-level investigation, he stopped short of stating that opening a full one violated any rule.Mr. Durham also used court filings in those cases to insinuate that the Clinton campaign framed former President Donald J. Trump for collusion.Sophie Park for The New York TimesA remaining rationale for the Durham investigation was that Mr. Horowitz lacked jurisdiction to scrutinize spy agencies. But by the spring of 2020, according to officials familiar with the inquiry, Mr. Durham’s effort to find intelligence abuses in the origins of the Russia investigation had come up empty.Instead of wrapping up, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham shifted to a different rationale, hunting for a basis to blame the Clinton campaign for suspicions surrounding myriad links Trump campaign associates had to Russia.By keeping the investigation going, Mr. Barr initially appeased Mr. Trump, who, as Mr. Barr recounted in his memoir, was angry about the lack of charges as the 2020 election neared.But Mr. Barr’s public statements about Mr. Durham’s investigation also helped foster perceptions that he had found something big. In April 2020, for example, he suggested in a Fox News interview that officials could be prosecuted and said: “The evidence shows that we are not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here.”Mr. Trump and some of his allies in the news media went further, stoking expectations among his supporters that Mr. Durham would imprison high-level officials. Those include the former directors of the F.B.I. and C.I.A., James B. Comey and John O. Brennan, and Democratic leaders like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr.In fact, Mr. Durham only ever developed charges against two outsiders involved in efforts to scrutinize links between Mr. Trump and Russia, accusing them both of making false statements to the F.B.I. and treating the bureau as a victim, not a perpetrator.While in office, Mr. Barr worked closely with Mr. Durham, regularly meeting with him, sharing Scotch and accompanying him to Europe. When it became clear that Mr. Durham had found no one to charge before the election, Mr. Barr pushed him to draft a potential interim report, prompting Mr. Durham’s No. 2, Nora R. Dannehy, to resign in protest over ethics, The New York Times has reported.Against that backdrop, the first phase of Mr. Durham’s investigation — when he was a U.S. attorney appointed by Mr. Trump, not a special counsel — illustrates why there is a recurring public policy interest in shielding prosecutors pursuing politically sensitive matters from political appointees.But the second phase — after Mr. Barr made him a special counsel, entrenching him to remain under the Biden administration with some independence from Attorney General Merrick B. Garland — illustrates how prosecutorial independence itself risks a different kind of dysfunction.The regulations empowered Mr. Garland to block Mr. Durham from an action, but only if it was “so inappropriate or unwarranted under established departmental practices that it should not be pursued” and required him to tell Congress. Mr. Garland gave Mr. Durham free rein, avoiding Republican accusations of a cover-up.Mr. Durham continued for another two and a half years, spending millions of dollars to bring the two demonstrably weak cases involving accusations of false statements; in each instance, a jury of 12 unanimously rejected the charges. One of Mr. Durham’s handpicked prosecutors resigned from his team in protest of the first of those indictments, The Times has reported.But Mr. Durham’s use of his law enforcement powers did achieve something else. He used court filings to insinuate a theory he never found evidence to charge: that the Clinton campaign conspired to frame Mr. Trump for collusion. Those filings provided endless fodder for conservative news media.Even after Mr. Durham’s cases collapsed, some Trump supporters held out hope that his final report would deliver a bombshell. But it largely consisted of recycled material, interlaced with conclusions like Mr. Durham’s accusation that the F.B.I. had displayed a “lack of analytical rigor.”Attorney General William P. Barr bestowed Mr. Durham with special counsel status.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Durham’s own analytical rigor was subject to scrutiny. At one point he wrote that he had found “no evidence” that the F.B.I. ever considered whether Clinton campaign efforts to tie Mr. Trump to Russia might affect its investigation.Yet the same page cited messages by a top F.B.I. official, Peter Strzok, cautioning colleagues about the Steele dossier, a compendium of claims about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia that, it later became clear, were Clinton campaign-funded opposition research. He wrote that it “should be viewed as intended to influence as well as to inform” and whoever commissioned it was “presumed to be connected to the campaign in some way.”As Mr. Horowitz uncovered and criticized, the F.B.I. later cited the Steele dossier in wiretap applications, despite learning a reason to doubt its credibility. But Trump supporters often go further, falsely claiming that the F.B.I. opened the entire Russia investigation based on the dossier.Mr. Durham’s report appeared to nod to that false claim, saying that “information received from politically affiliated persons and entities” in part had “triggered” the inquiry. Yet elsewhere, his report acknowledged that the officials who opened the investigation in July 2016 had not yet seen the dossier, and it was prompted by the Australian diplomat’s tip. He also conceded that there was “no question the F.B.I. had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” that lead.Tom Fitton, a Trump ally and the leader of the conservative group Judicial Watch, expressed disappointment in the Durham investigation in a statement this week, while insisting that there had been a “conspiracy by Obama, Biden, Clinton and their Deep State allies.”“Durham let down the American people with few and failed prosecutions,” Mr. Fitton declared. “Never in American history has so much government corruption faced so little accountability.”But Aitan Goelman, a lawyer for Mr. Strzok, said that while the special counsel accused the F.B.I. of “confirmation bias,” it was Mr. Durham who spent four years trying to find support for a preformed belief about the Russia investigation.“In fact, it is Mr. Durham’s investigation that was politically motivated, a direct consequence of former President Trump’s weaponization of the Department of Justice, an effort that unanimous juries in each of Mr. Durham’s trials soundly rejected,” he said.Adam Goldman More

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    Durham Report Finds Fault With FBI Over Trump-Russia Investigation

    The special counsel’s final report nevertheless did not produce blockbuster revelations of politically motivated misconduct, as Donald J. Trump and his allies had suggested it would.John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel who for four years has pursued a politically fraught investigation into the Russia inquiry, accused the F.B.I. of having “discounted or willfully ignored material information” that countered the narrative of collusion between Donald J. Trump and Russia in a final report made public on Monday.Mr. Durham’s 306-page report revealed little substantial new information about the inquiry, known as Crossfire Hurricane, and it failed to produce the kinds of blockbuster revelations accusing the bureau of politically motivated misconduct that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies suggested Mr. Durham would uncover.Instead, the report — released without substantive comment or any redactions by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland — largely recounted previously exposed flaws in the inquiry, while concluding that the F.B.I. suffered from confirmation bias and a “lack of analytical rigor” as it pursued leads about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.“An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the F.B.I. to question not only the predication for Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the F.B.I. was being manipulated for political or other purposes,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, it did not.”Mr. Durham said he was not recommending any “wholesale changes” to F.B.I. rules for politically sensitive investigations and for national-security wiretaps, which have already been tightened in recent years. He did recommend that the Justice Department consider assigning an official to internally challenge steps taken in politically sensitive investigations.The report amounted, in part, to a defense and justification of a lengthy investigation that developed only two criminal cases, both of which ended in acquittal.Mr. Durham repeated his own insinuations, presented in court filings, that information developed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign had helped fuel the Russia investigation, which shadowed nearly two years of Mr. Trump’s presidency and was eventually overseen by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.He also repeated criticisms made in 2019 by an inspector general who uncovered how the F.B.I. botched wiretap applications used in the inquiry.In a statement, the F.B.I. emphasized its numerous overhauls since the 2019 report.“The conduct in 2016 and 2017 that Special Counsel Durham examined was the reason that current F.B.I. leadership already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time,” it said.Mr. Durham went beyond criticizing the wiretap applications, writing: “Our investigation also revealed that senior F.B.I. personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor toward the information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities. This information in part triggered and sustained Crossfire Hurricane and contributed to the subsequent need for Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation.”But in using the word “triggered,” Mr. Durham’s report echoed a conspiracy theory pushed by supporters of Mr. Trump that the F.B.I. opened the investigation in July 2016 based on the so-called Steele dossier, opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign that was later discredited.In fact, as Mr. Durham acknowledged elsewhere in the report, the dossier did not reach those investigators until mid-September. The F.B.I. instead opened the investigation based on a tip from an Australian diplomat, after WikiLeaks published hacked Democratic emails, that a Trump campaign aide seemed to have advance knowledge that Russia would release information damaging to the Clinton campaign.The special prosecutor’s findings were sent to Mr. Garland on Friday, a department spokeswoman said.Mr. Durham’s team submitted a draft report to the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. in March so those agencies could flag classified and other sensitive information, according to people familiar with the matter. A career Justice Department employee also inspected the draft for information that could raise privacy issues for government employees.The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a close Trump ally, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, said on Twitter that he would invite Mr. Durham to testify next week.Other Republicans seized on the report as confirmation that the Russia investigation had been tainted by partisanship, suggesting that Mr. Durham’s report would continue to fuel accusations that the Justice Department had been deployed against the former president.“The Durham Report confirmed what we already knew: weaponized federal agencies manufactured a false conspiracy theory about Trump-Russia collusion,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Twitter.Mr. Durham’s investigation traces back to early 2019, when Mr. Mueller delivered a final report that detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.” It established how Moscow had worked to help Mr. Trump win and how his campaign had expected to benefit from the foreign interference, but Mr. Mueller did not find sufficient evidence to charge any Trump campaign associate with a criminal conspiracy with Russia.Seizing on the findings, Mr. Trump portrayed that report as vindication that the Russia investigation was based on a hoax, as he had insisted.The next month, Attorney General William P. Barr assigned Mr. Durham, then the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing. Mr. Barr later bestowed special counsel status on Mr. Durham, allowing him to stay in place after Mr. Trump left office.The Durham report has been long awaited by supporters of Mr. Trump, who once hoped that the special counsel would prove Mr. Trump’s theory that the Russia investigation had been a “deep state” conspiracy to sabotage him for political reasons. Mr. Trump would put high-level political or national security officials in prison, they insisted.But over an investigation that lasted about four years — far longer than the Russia investigation — Mr. Durham never fulfilled those expectations.Critics have argued his investigation was superfluous: An inspector general for the Justice Department, Michael E. Horowitz, was already scrutinizing the Russia investigation for evidence of misconduct or bias, and he released a report on the matter in December 2019.Mr. Horowitz did not find evidence that the F.B.I. had taken any investigative steps based on improper political reasons. And he concluded that the investigation’s basis — the Australian diplomat’s tip — had been sufficient to lawfully open the full counterintelligence inquiry.In his report, Mr. Durham also criticized the F.B.I. for relying on the Australian diplomat’s tip without asking more questions about the credibility of what the Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, had said. But Mr. Durham also acknowledged there was “no question the F.B.I. had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” what the Australians had provided, striking a contradictory tone. Aitan Goelman, a lawyer for Peter Strzok, the former F.B.I. agent who opened the Russia investigation and interviewed the Australians, defended the inquiry and noted that the inspector general had said it was properly predicated.“When the F.B.I. received credible information from a senior official of a close American ally that the government of Russia was interfering in the upcoming presidential election on behalf of the Trump campaign, the bureau could not ignore that information,” he said in a statement.Mr. Durham also broached the Steele dossier, building on extensive findings by Mr. Horowitz.In his December 2019 report, Mr. Horowitz pointed to multiple ways in which the F.B.I. had botched wiretap applications used to target a former Trump campaign adviser with links to Russia, Carter Page. That included relying on allegations in the dossier in renewal applications after the F.B.I. had reason to doubt its credibility.Mr. Horowitz also developed a criminal referral against an F.B.I. lawyer who had doctored an email used in preparation for a renewal application.Picking up that referral, Mr. Durham negotiated a guilty plea with that lawyer, which resulted in no prison time. The only two cases Mr. Durham himself developed, both cases of false statements against people involved in outside efforts that raised suspicions over Mr. Trump’s possible ties to Russia, ended in acquittal.Some Trump supporters grew disillusioned as Mr. Durham did not indict high-level officials leading up to the 2020 election. In March 2021, Mr. Trump issued a sarcastic statement, asking: “Where’s Durham? Is he a living, breathing human being? Will there ever be a Durham report?”After Mr. Durham had spent a year fruitlessly hunting for evidence to support Mr. Barr’s theory that intelligence abuses lurked in the origins of the Russia inquiry, he and his prosecutors shifted gears to look for a basis to blame Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for the fact that Mr. Trump came under suspicion of colluding with Russia.The two cases Mr. Durham brought were against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with Democratic ties who had passed on a tip to the F.B.I. about odd internet data linking servers for the Trump Organization and a Russian bank, and Igor Danchenko, a primary researcher for the Steele dossier.Mr. Durham’s court filings in both cases extensively implied that the Clinton campaign had essentially set out to frame Mr. Trump for collusion. Although he charged no conspiracy, his insinuation that there might have been one provided fodder to right-wing media.Mr. Durham returned to a Clinton theme in his report.The F.B.I.’s “apparent confirmation bias, and an overwillingness to rely on information from individuals connected to political opponents caused investigators to fail to adequately consider alternative hypotheses and to act without appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign a foreign power,” Mr. Durham wrote.Mr. Durham also compared the F.B.I.’s aggression in investigating potential links between Mr. Trump and Russia with what he described as its greater caution toward several investigations involving allegations related to Mrs. Clinton.Still, Mr. Durham’s report added a new detail about the F.B.I.’s investigation of a foreign donor who apparently sought to buy influence with the Clinton campaign.In January 2016, Mr. Durham revealed, a confidential informant attended a Clinton fund-raiser with the F.B.I.’s approval. The F.B.I. later told the informant to stay away from Clinton campaign events.The F.B.I. eventually gave Mrs. Clinton’s campaign a so-called defensive briefing about the effort. Mr. Durham criticized the F.B.I. for giving Mrs. Clinton’s campaign the briefing but not supplying one to Mr. Trump about the Russia suspicions, and for not following up on a suggestion that the informant may have been illegally reimbursed by the foreign donor for a $2,700 donation to the Clinton campaign.In January, a report by The New York Times, based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials, showed how Mr. Durham’s inquiry became roiled by internal dissent over prosecutorial ethics, leading two prosecutors on his staff to resign in protest.The article also described how 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 liberal philanthropist who is a target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham shifted to using grand jury powers to obtain the information after a judge twice rejected his request for an order as legally insufficient.The article also revealed that in the fall of 2019, Italian officials unexpectedly gave Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham a tip about suspected financial crimes linked to Mr. Trump. While the tip was unrelated to the Russia investigation, Mr. Barr had Mr. Durham investigate the matter rather than referring it to another prosecutor. Mr. Durham brought no charges.Mr. Durham’s report did not mention any of those matters.Maggie Astor More

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    Prosecutors in Jan. 6 Case Step up Inquiry Into Trump Fund-Raising

    The Justice Department has been gathering evidence about whether the former president and his allies solicited donations with claims of election fraud they knew to be false.As they investigate former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, federal prosecutors have also been drilling down on whether Mr. Trump and a range of political aides knew that he had lost the race but still raised money off claims that they were fighting widespread fraud in the vote results, according to three people familiar with the matter.Led by the special counsel Jack Smith, prosecutors are trying to determine whether Mr. Trump and his aides violated federal wire fraud statutes as they raised as much as $250 million through a political action committee by saying they needed the money to fight to reverse election fraud even though they had been told repeatedly that there was no evidence to back up those fraud claims.The prosecutors are looking at the inner workings of the committee, Save America PAC, and at the Trump campaign’s efforts to prove its baseless case that Mr. Trump had been cheated out of victory.In the past several months, prosecutors have issued multiple batches of subpoenas in a wide-ranging effort to understand Save America, which was set up shortly after the election as Mr. Trump’s main fund-raising entity. An initial round of subpoenas, which started going out before Mr. Trump declared his candidacy in the 2024 race and Mr. Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in November, focused on various Republican officials and vendors that had received payments from Save America.But more recently, investigators have homed in on the activities of a joint fund-raising committee made up of staff members from the 2020 Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, among others. Some of the subpoenas have sought documents from around Election Day 2020 up the present.Prosecutors have been heavily focused on details of the campaign’s finances, spending and fund-raising, such as who was approving email solicitations that were blasted out to lists of possible small donors and what they knew about the truth of the fraud claims, according to the people familiar with their work. All three areas overlap, and could inform prosecutors’ thinking about whether to proceed with charges in an investigation in which witnesses are still being interviewed.The possibility that the fund-raising efforts might have been criminally fraudulent was first raised last year by the House select committee investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to retain power.But the Justice Department, with its ability to bring criminal charges, has been able to prompt more extensive cooperation from a number of witnesses. And prosecutors have developed more information than the House committee did, having targeted communications between Trump campaign aides and other Republican officials to determine if a barrage of fund-raising solicitations sent out after the election were knowingly misleading, according to the three people familiar with the matter.The fund-raising efforts are just one focus of Mr. Smith’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to reverse his loss at the polls.Led by the special counsel Jack Smith, prosecutors are trying to determine whether Mr. Trump and his aides violated federal wire fraud statutes.Peter Dejong/Associated PressProsecutors have also been examining the plan to assemble alternate slates of pro-Trump electors from swing states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the broader push by Mr. Trump to block or delay congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, 2021, leading to the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters.On Thursday, former Vice President Mike Pence, a key witness to Mr. Trump’s efforts, testified for hours to the grand jury gathering evidence in the investigation.Prosecutors have been looking at the nexus between research the Trump campaign commissioned almost immediately after the election to try to prove widespread fraud, public statements that he and his allies made at the time, the fund-raising efforts and the establishment of Save America.The Washington Post reported earlier on the efforts by the campaign to fund research into claims of fraud and the new round of subpoenas.Mr. Trump’s team may argue that the fund-raising represented political speech with solicitations that were generally vague, and that subjecting it to a criminal process could raise First Amendment issues and create a slippery slope for future candidates. Political fund-raising materials often engage in bombast or exaggeration.Republicans may also argue that Democrats have been loose in claims they have used in fund-raising solicitations. And the Trump campaign may argue that it did in fact use the funds to try to investigate fraud.Jason Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump who worked on the 2020 campaign, said that the “Deep State is ramping up their attacks on President Trump” as his poll numbers have increased. “The ‘political police’ have been pushing their witch hunt since President Trump came down the escalator, and they’ve been proven wrong every single time,” he added.Officials with the Republican National Committee declined to comment.Immediately after the election, an adviser to the Trump campaign reached out to Ken Block, the owner of a Rhode Island-based firm, Simpatico Software Systems, to have him evaluate specific allegations of fraud.Jason Miller, a former top Trump aide, appearing on a screen last year during a hearing of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot. Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Block ended up researching multiple claims of possible fraud that Mr. Trump’s aides brought to him. He never produced a final report. But each time he investigated a claim, he said in an interview, he found there was nothing to it.Mr. Block said he had disproved “everything that came in and found no substantive fraud sufficient to overturn an election result.” He said he was isolated from what was taking place within the campaign, as Mr. Trump railed at aides about staying in office and continued to insist he had won an election that he was repeatedly told he had lost.“I was kept very walled off from all of the insanity,” said Mr. Block, whose firm was paid $735,000, records show. He received a subpoena for documents, but declined in the interview to discuss anything related to the grand jury.Days after starting to work with Mr. Block and Simpatico, the Trump campaign hired a second firm, the Berkeley Research Group. The federal grand jury has received evidence that Berkeley was hired at the suggestion of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, who was overseeing the political operation.The grand jury has been asking questions related to whether Mr. Trump was briefed on findings by Berkeley suggesting there had been no widespread fraud.The company ultimately submitted a report indicating there had been no fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election, and was paid roughly $600,000 for its work. The company was hired through a law firm that has long represented Mr. Trump in his personal capacity, Kasowitz Benson Torres, although lawyers there were not involved in pursuing Mr. Trump’s election fraud claims, according to a person briefed on the matter.A deputy counsel for Berkeley Research Group said the company has a “no comment” policy and declined to discuss the matter further.During the House Jan. 6 committee’s proceedings last year, several people close to Mr. Trump testified that they had informed him that there had been no fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the voting.Within two weeks of the election, the Trump campaign’s own communications staff drafted an internal report debunking many aspects of a conspiracy theory that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been hacked and used to flip votes away from Mr. Trump. That report was written before pro-Trump lawyers like Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani promoted the false Dominion story at news conferences and on television.As part of its investigation into the Trump campaign’s postelection fund-raising, the Jan. 6 panel subpoenaed records from Salesforce.com, a vendor that helped the campaign and the Republican National Committee send emails to potential donors. The R.N.C. fought back, filing a lawsuit to quash the subpoena, and the House committee ultimately withdrew it.In the latest round of subpoenas, federal prosecutors have sought documents related to Salesforce in addition to other vendors, according to a person briefed on the matter. More

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    Pence Testifies Before Grand Jury on Trump’s Efforts to Retain Power

    The former vice president is a key witness to former President Donald Trump’s attempts to block congressional certification of Joseph Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.Former Vice President Mike Pence appeared on Thursday before the grand jury hearing evidence about former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election, a person briefed on the matter said, testifying in a criminal inquiry that could shape the legal and political fate of his one-time boss and possible 2024 rival.Mr. Pence spent more than five hours behind closed doors at the Federal District Court in Washington in an appearance that came after he was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury earlier this year.As the target of an intense pressure campaign in the final days of 2020 and early 2021 by Mr. Trump to convince him to play a critical role in blocking or delaying congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, Mr. Pence is considered a key witness in the investigation.Mr. Pence, who is expected to decide soon about whether to challenge Mr. Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, rebuffed Mr. Trump’s demands that he use his role as president of the Senate in the certification of the Electoral College results to derail the final step in affirming Mr. Biden’s victory.Mr. Pence’s advisers had discussions with Justice Department officials last year about providing testimony in their criminal investigation into whether Mr. Trump and a number of his allies broke federal law in trying to keep Mr. Trump in power. But the talks broke down, leading prosecutors to seek a subpoena for Mr. Pence’s testimony.Both Mr. Pence and Mr. Trump tried to fight the subpoena, with the former vice president claiming it violated the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution given his role overseeing the election results certification on Jan. 6, 2021, and Mr. Trump claiming their discussions were covered by executive privilege.Mr. Trump’s efforts to prevent testimony based on executive privilege claims were rebuffed by the courts. Mr. Pence partially won in his effort to forestall or limit his testimony; the chief judge overseeing the grand jury ruled that he would not have to discuss matters connected to his role as president of the Senate on Jan. 6, but that he would have to testify to any potential criminality by Mr. Trump.A federal appeals court on Wednesday night rejected an emergency attempt by Mr. Trump to stop Mr. Pence’s testimony, allowing the testimony to go forward on Thursday.Mr. Trump’s effort to hold onto the presidency after his defeat at the polls — and how it led to the assault on the Capitol — is the focus of one of the two federal criminal investigations being overseen by Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. Mr. Smith is also managing the parallel investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.Mr. Smith has gathered evidence about a wide range of activities by Mr. Trump and his allies following Election Day in 2020. They include a plan to assemble slates of alternate electors from a number of swing states who could be put forward by Mr. Trump as he disputed the Electoral College results. They also encompass an examination of whether Mr. Trump defrauded donors by soliciting contributions to fight election fraud despite having been repeatedly told that there was no evidence that the election had been stolen from him.A district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., Fani T. Willis, has also been gathering evidence about whether Mr. Trump engaged in a conspiracy to overturn the election results in that state, and has signaled that she will announce any indictments this summer.Mr. Pence’s unwillingness to go along with Mr. Trump’s plan to block or delay certification of the electoral outcome, infuriated Mr. Trump, who assailed his vice president privately and publicly on Jan. 6.Mr. Pence subsequently became a target of the pro-Trump mob that swamped the Capitol building that day, with some chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” as they moved through the complex. Someone brought a fake gallows that stood outside the building.It is not clear what testimony Mr. Pence provided on Thursday. But prosecutors were surely interested in Mr. Pence’s accounts of his interactions with Mr. Trump and Trump advisers including John Eastman, a lawyer who promoted the idea that they could use the congressional certification process on Jan. 6 to give Mr. Trump a chance to remain in office.That plan relied on Mr. Pence using his role as president of the Senate to hold up the process. But Mr. Pence’s top lawyer and outside advisers concluded that the vice president did not have the legal authority to do so.Mr. Pence described some of his conversations with Mr. Trump in his memoir, “So Help Me God.”Mr. Pence described in the book how Mr. Trump worked with Mr. Eastman to pressure him into doing something that the vice president was clear that he could not and would not do. He wrote that on the morning of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump tried to bludgeon him again on a phone call.“You’ll go down as a wimp,” the president told the vice president. “If you do that, I made a big mistake five years ago!”Some of Mr. Pence’s aides have already appeared before the grand jury, in addition to providing extensive testimony last year to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot and what led to it. More