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    Poised and Precise, Hur Enters Fray Over Special Counsel’s Report on Biden

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    Robert K. Hur defended himself in the unhurried, forceful cadence of a veteran prosecutor, delivering his responses in a flat, matter-of-fact tone.The former special counsel Robert K. Hur, denounced by Democrats for his unsparing description of President Biden’s memory lapses, had one of his own during his testimony on Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee.Representative James R. Comer, a Kentucky Republican, made passing reference to Dana A. Remus, a Democratic lawyer who had served as White House counsel under Mr. Biden from January 2021 to July 2022.Mr. Hur crinkled an eyebrow and corrected him: No, he said, she occupied that post under President Obama.The misstep was an isolated moment in an otherwise poised and precise appearance by Mr. Hur, 51, who was testifying about his report on the investigation into Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents.Mr. Hur, a Trump-era Justice Department official known among former colleagues for keeping a cool head in high-stress, high-stakes situations, incited a furor after describing the president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” A transcript of his five-hour interview with Mr. Biden, released just before his appearance, raised questions about that characterization.Before his work as special counsel, Mr. Hur, a graduate of Stanford Law School who clerked for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, was best known for his 11-month stint as the top aide to the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, in 2017 and 2018. It was a time of extraordinary upheaval, when Mr. Rosenstein oversaw the installment of a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to investigate President Donald J. Trump’s dealings with Russia. Both men lived under the constant threat of being fired by Mr. Trump, who saw the appointment as a personal betrayal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Jack Smith Quickly Brought Two Indictments Against Trump

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      Last fall, a largely unknown former prosecutor with a beard and a brisk gait flew unnoticed to Washington from The Hague after being summoned to a secret meeting by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.Jack Smith’s job interview would remain unknown to all but a handful of department officials until hours before he was appointed special counsel to oversee two investigations into former President Donald J. Trump in mid-November.Over the past few months of frenetic activity, Mr. Smith’s anonymity has vanished. He has now indicted Mr. Trump twice: in June, for risking national security secrets by taking classified documents from the White House, and on Tuesday, in connection with his widespread efforts to subvert democracy and overturn an election in 2020 he clearly lost.And he has taken these actions with remarkable speed, aggressiveness and apparent indifference to collateral political consequences.Mr. Smith has now indicted former President Donald J. Trump twice.Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times“He’s going at a very fast clip — not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good — to the point that I sometimes worry they might be going a little too fast and haven’t buttoned everything up,” said Ryan Goodman, a professor at the New York University School of Law, before the release of the indictment in the election case.Mr. Smith told reporters that the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was “fueled by lies” — Mr. Trump’s lies — during brief remarks on Tuesday, after a jury in Washington indicted the former president on four counts.Mr. Smith is not the first special counsel to investigate Mr. Trump. From 2017 to 2019, Robert S. Mueller III examined ties between Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. In his final report, he laid out a frantic effort by Mr. Trump to thwart a federal inquiry but ultimately cited a Justice Department policy in not making a determination on whether the sitting president had committed a crime. Mr. Smith, by contrast, faces no such limits, given that Mr. Trump is no longer in office.But where Mr. Mueller took two years to conclude his investigations into Mr. Trump, Mr. Smith — who took over investigations into Mr. Trump that were several months old — delivered his basic assessment in two criminal investigations in a little over eight months.Beyond the contrast in circumstances and timing, there are undeniable differences between the two men, rooted in their respective ages, experiences, management styles and prosecutorial philosophies, that have shaped their divergent charging decisions.“His disposition, compared to Mueller, seems very different — he’s working against the clock, Mueller moved a lot more slowly,” said Mr. Goodman, who is a co-founder of Just Security, an online publication that has closely monitored the Trump investigations.Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans have accused Mr. Smith, without evidence, of pursuing a politically motivated investigation intended to destroy Mr. Trump’s chances of retaking the White House, including by leaking details of the case. But department officials have said Mr. Smith is committed to conducting a fair investigation, and he has defended his own lawyers against attacks from the Trump team, who accuse them of using unethical tactics.The former president has taken to calling Mr. Smith “deranged,” and some of his supporters have threatened the special counsel, his family and his team — prompting the U.S. Marshals to spend $1.9 million to provide protection for those who have been targeted, according to federal expense reports that cover the first four months of his tenure. Mr. Smith was flanked by a three-person security detail inside his own building when he delivered remarks to reporters on Tuesday.Mr. Mueller was an established and trusted national figure when he was appointed special counsel, unlike Mr. Smith, who was virtually unknown outside the department and drew a mixed record during his tenure. Mr. Mueller had already solidified a reputation as the most important F.B.I. director since J. Edgar Hoover, after protecting and reshaping the bureau at a time when some were calling for breaking it up following the intelligence failures that preceded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel, was an established and trusted national figure when he was appointed.Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesBut there was, at times, a gap between the perception of Mr. Mueller and his ability to execute a difficult job under fire. Already in his mid-70s, he struck many of those who working with him as a notably diminished figure who, in testifying before Congress at the end of the investigation, was not entirely in command of the facts of his complex investigation.By comparison, Mr. Smith is someone who rose to the upper echelons of the Justice Department but is not well known outside of law enforcement circles. At 54, Mr. Smith, a lifelong prosecutor, is leading the investigation at the height of his career, not at the end of it.Mr. Smith is fresh off a stint as a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague and took over two investigations that were already well down the road. Mr. Smith sees himself as a ground-level prosecutor paid to make a series of fast decisions. He is determined to do everything he can to quickly strengthen a case (or end it) — by squeezing witnesses and using prosecutorial tools, such as summoning potential targets of prosecution before a grand jury to emphasize the seriousness of his inquiries, people close to him have said.When Mr. Smith took over as chief of the Justice Department’s public integrity unit in 2010, the unit was reeling from the collapse of a criminal case against former Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska. In his first few months on the job, he closed several prominent investigations into members of Congress without charges.At the time, Mr. Smith brushed off the suggestion that he had lost his nerve. “If I were the sort of person who could be cowed,” he said, “I would find another line of work.”Among his more notable corruption cases was a conviction of Robert McDonnell, the Republican former governor of Virginia, that was later overturned by the Supreme Court, and a conviction of former Representative Rick Renzi, Republican of Arizona, whom Mr. Trump pardoned during his final hours as president.Mr. Smith appears to be somewhat more involved than Mr. Mueller in the granular details of his investigations. Even so, he seldom sits in personally on witness interviews — and spoke only sparingly during two meetings with Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers, delegating the discussions to subordinates, according to people familiar with the situation.Mr. Smith’s stony style, intentional or not, has the effect of sowing considerable unease across a conference table or courtroom.James Trusty, who quit the former president’s defense team a day after meeting with Mr. Smith’s team in June, worked for years with Mr. Smith as a senior criminal prosecutor at Justice Department headquarters and told associates he was a “serious” adversary not to be underestimated. Other lawyers said Mr. Smith’s team has fed the sense of mystery by describing him in veiled or cryptic terms, with one calling him “the man behind the curtain.”He has been more public-facing than Mr. Mueller in one critical respect — delivering short, sober statements to the news media after each grand jury indictment.Mr. Mueller said little when faced with a barrage of falsehoods pushed publicly by Mr. Trump and his allies about him and his investigative team. But at a news conference after Mr. Trump was indicted in the documents case, Mr. Smith seemed to be speaking with an added purpose: to rebut claims that one of his prosecutors, Jay I. Bratt, had inappropriately pressured a defense lawyer representing one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.“The prosecutors in my office are among the most talented and experienced in the Department of Justice,” he said. “They have investigated this case hewing to the highest ethical standards.”While much attention has centered on Mr. Smith, most of the day-to-day work on critical elements of the case has been done by several prosecutors known for their aggressive approaches.One of them is J.P. Cooney, the former leader of the public corruption division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. Mr. Cooney has worked on several politically fraught trials and investigations that drew the ire of Republicans and Democrats alike.He unsuccessfully prosecuted two Democrats — Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Greg Craig, a former White House counsel during the Obama administration — and investigated Andrew G. McCabe, the former F.B.I. deputy director, who was vilified by Mr. Trump for the bureau’s Russia investigation. (Mr. McCabe was never prosecuted.)More recently, Mr. Cooney oversaw the lawyers prosecuting Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime political adviser to Mr. Trump. The lawyers quit in protest after the Justice Department under William P. Barr intervened in his sentencing. (Mr. Cooney was deeply upset by the intervention, but he said the case was “not the hill worth dying on” according to Aaron Zelinsky, a career prosecutor, who testified before the House Oversight Committee in 2020.)A second key player is Thomas P. Windom, who was brought in nearly a year before Mr. Smith’s appointment to coordinate the complicated Jan. 6 investigation that had once been seated in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington.Mr. Smith had a stint as a war crimes prosecutor at The Hague, in the Netherlands.Pool photo by Peter DejongMr. Smith has relied on F.B.I. agents to perform investigative tasks, which is not uncommon for special counsels. But the F.B.I. is not walled off from Mr. Smith’s investigation, unlike the agents who were detailed to work for John H. Durham, a special counsel who investigated the origins of the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation.In a letter to House Republicans in June, Carlos F. Uriarte, the Justice Department’s legislative affairs director, disclosed that Mr. Smith employed about 26 special agents, with additional agents being brought on from “time to time” for specific tasks related to the investigations.Mr. Smith, unlike many previous special counsels, did not hire most of the staff: He inherited two existing Trump investigations and moved them from Justice Department headquarters to his new office across town. Some of the investigative legwork was also done by investigators with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and agents with the Justice Department’s inspector general working alongside Mr. Windom at one point.He has, however, exerted direct control over both inquiries, trying to keep even the most quotidian information about his efforts away from the news media, and been present, if sotto voce, at the most critical moments.During Mr. Trump’s arraignment in Miami in June, Mr. Smith sat in the gallery, closely watching the proceedings. Some in the courtroom suggested he stared at Mr. Trump for much of the hearing, sizing him up.But that was not really the case. He listened intently to the lawyers on both sides, at times leaning in toward a colleague to make a whispered comment or ask a question.Alan Feuer More

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      Special Counsel Who Hunted for a Deep-State Conspiracy Presents Muted Findings

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      John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel, criticized the F.B.I. during a six-hour hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel who for four years pursued a politically fraught investigation into the Russia inquiry, told lawmakers on Wednesday that F.B.I. officials had exhibited confirmation bias — even as he defended his work against Democratic accusations that he became a partisan tool.In a nearly six-hour hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Durham rarely offered new information, repeatedly saying he did not want to go beyond his report. That approach echoed an appearance in 2019 before the same committee by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the investigation into possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.The hearing may be the final — official, at least — chapter in the complex saga of the Russia investigation and former President Donald J. Trump’s repeated efforts to reframe it as a deep-state plot, which has been a source of turbulence in American political life for more than six years. Mr. Durham retired after completing his report last month, and Senate Democrats have not invited him to testify.For years, Mr. Trump and his allies stoked expectations that Mr. Durham would find a conspiracy lurking in the origins of the Russia investigation and would prosecute high-level officials. But Mr. Durham developed only two peripheral cases, both of which ended in acquittals, while citing flaws in the F.B.I.’s early investigative steps he attributed to confirmation bias.“There were identified, documented, significant failures of a highly sensitive, unique investigation that was undertaken by the F.B.I.,” Mr. Durham said. “The investigation clearly reveals that decisions that were made were made in one direction. If there was something that was inconsistent with the notion that Trump was involved in a well-coordinated conspiracy with the Russians, that information was largely discarded or ignored.”The hearing was largely a predicable display of partisanship, with each party trading claims about the merits of the underlying investigation into Russia’s attempt to manipulate the 2016 election in Mr. Trump’s favor. Mr. Mueller documented myriad links between Russia and Trump campaign officials, but did not charge any Trump associate with a criminal conspiracy with Russia.Republicans railed against the Russia investigation as unjustified and portrayed it as politically motivated and corrupt, focusing on flawed wiretap applications and text messages in which F.B.I. officials expressed animus toward Mr. Trump.Democrats defended it as legitimate and necessary by turning to the substance of Mr. Mueller’s work. Not only did he indict numerous Russians — and win convictions of multiple Trump associates on other crimes — but he also uncovered how the Trump campaign’s chairman had shared internal polling and strategy with a Russian and Ukrainian political consultant the government says is a Russian intelligence agent, among other things.For large portions of the hearing, Mr. Durham served as a foil for both purposes, as lawmakers on each side asked questions intended to affirm whatever facts or claims they wanted to emphasize.President Donald J. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr and their allies in Congress stoked expectations that Mr. Durham would find a “deep state” conspiracy.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesMuch of his own critique of the investigation was familiar territory. The most factually grounded portions — especially errors and omissions in a set of wiretap applications that relied in part on claims in the so-called Steele dossier, a dubious compendium of what turned out to be opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign — echoed a December 2019 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general. Mr. Durham repeated those findings, but offered no concrete new suggestions for reforms.Other parts were more ephemeral. After Mr. Durham’s initial effort to find intelligence abuses at the heart of the Russia investigation came up empty, he shifted to hunting for a basis to blame the Clinton campaign. He used court filings and his report to insinuate that the campaign set out to defraud the F.B.I. and frame Mr. Trump, although he never charged any such conspiracy. Some Republicans, however, treated that idea as established fact.“What role did the Clinton campaign play in this hoax?” asked Representative Tom McClintock, Republican of California, adding, “Exactly what was the ‘Clinton Plan?’”But some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters expressed disappointment that Mr. Durham did not live up to the grander expectations that he would put high-level officials in prison and prove a deep-state conspiracy.For example, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, insisted that suspicions about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia emerged because of an operation by Western intelligence agencies — a conspiracy theory that Mr. Durham set out to prove but failed to find evidence to support. Mr. Gaetz said Mr. Durham had let the country down, and compared the special counsel’s inquiry to the Washington Generals, the basketball team whose job is to lose in exhibition games against the Harlem Globetrotters.“When you are part of the cover-up, Mr. Durham, then it makes our job harder,” Mr. Gaetz said.Mr. Durham replied that Mr. Gaetz’s comments were “offensive.”Representative Matt Gaetz suggested that Mr. Durham was part of a cover-up.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesBut while most of the Republicans on the committee gave Mr. Durham a warmer welcome, he did not always say things that supported their position. Mr. Durham called Mr. Mueller a “patriot” and did not contradict any of his findings. He said that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election — and characterized that intelligence operation as a “significant threat.”Pushed by Representative Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, to go beyond his report’s conclusion that F.B.I. agents had acted with “confirmation bias” and accuse them in his testimony of having taken steps motivated by political favoritism, Mr. Durham demurred, saying that “it’s difficult to get into somebody else’s head.”And he said that the F.B.I. had “an affirmative duty” to open some kind of investigation into the allegation that served as the Russia investigation’s basis — an Australian diplomat said that a Trump campaign adviser had made a comment suggesting that the campaign had advance knowledge that Russia would anonymously dump out hacked Democratic emails.Still, he also testified that “in my view,” that information did not amount to “a legitimate basis to open as a full investigation” and that the bureau ought to have opened it as a lower-tier inquiry, like an “assessment” or a “preliminary” investigation. That went slightly beyond his report, which had argued that opening the inquiry at a lower level would have been better.The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, concluded in 2019 that the same information was a sufficient basis to open a “full” counterintelligence inquiry.Throughout the hearing, Democrats pressed Mr. Durham to acknowledge or explain certain findings from a New York Times article in January examining how his inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes.Mr. Durham rarely offered new information, repeatedly saying he did not want to go beyond his report. Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesThey asked him, for example, why his longtime deputy, Nora R. Dannehy, resigned from his team in September 2020. The Times reported that she did so in protest after disputes over prosecutorial ethics, including the drafting of a potential interim report before the 2020 election.Mr. Durham spoke highly of Ms. Dannehy but declined to say why she had resigned. He called the Times article “unsourced” but did not deny its findings, adding, “To the extent The New York Times wrote an article suggesting certain things, it is what it is.”Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, asked Mr. Durham whether it was true, as the Times also reported, that when he and Attorney General William P. Barr traveled to Italy to pursue a certain pro-Trump conspiracy theory, Italian officials denied it but passed on a tip about unrelated financial crimes linked to Mr. Trump.Mr. Barr decided the allegation, whose details remain unclear, was too serious to ignore but had Mr. Durham control an investigation into it, and he filed no charges, The Times reported.“The question’s outside the scope of what I think I’m authorized to talk about — it’s not part of the report,” Mr. Durham replied, but added: “I can tell you this. That investigative steps were taken, grand jury subpoenas were issued and it came to nothing.” More

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      Durham Report Finds Fault With FBI Over Trump-Russia Investigation

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      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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      Barr and Durham Made a Mockery of the Rules I Wrote

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      The recent revelations about Special Counsel John H. Durham’s investigation of the origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry paint a bleak picture — one that’s thoroughly at odds with governing law. Those rules, called the Special Counsel Regulations, contemplate someone independent of the attorney general who can reassure the public that justice is being done.I drafted those guidelines as a young Justice Department official, and there is zero chance that anyone involved in the process, as it was reported on by The New York Times, would think that former Attorney General William Barr or Mr. Durham acted appropriately.According to the report, Mr. Barr granted Mr. Durham special counsel status to dig into a theory that the Russia investigation likely emerged from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. That investigation took almost four years (longer than Mr. Mueller’s inquiry) and appears to be ending soon without any hint of a deep state plot against Mr. Trump.Furthermore, the reporting suggests that the Durham inquiry suffered from internal dissent and ethical disputes as it lurched from one unsuccessful path to another, even as Americans heard a misleading narrative of its progress.But now Merrick Garland, not Mr. Barr, is the attorney general, and the regulations give him the power to require Mr. Durham to explain himself — and to discipline and fire Mr. Durham if the explanation is not adequate. Right now, there are a plethora of investigations in Washington — in addition to Mr. Durham’s, two special counsels are looking into presidential handling of classified documents, the new Republican House of Representatives has created a “weaponization” of government committee and the new House Oversight Committee is ramping up as well.At this moment, it is critical for Mr. Garland to use the supervisory powers under the Special Counsel Regulations that govern Mr. Durham to remind Americans of what actual justice, and independent investigations and decision making, look like.The special counsel regulations say that a special counsel must have “a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking” and that, once appointed, the counsel “shall not be subject to the day-to-day supervision” of the attorney general or any other Justice Department official.The point of the regulations was to create a strong degree of independence, especially in highly fraught political investigations where the attorney general’s status as a presidential appointee might cause the public to question the appearance of partiality. The appointment of Robert Hur, a former Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, to examine President Biden’s handling of classified documents is a perfect illustration. The special counsel is supposed to be someone who cannot be reasonably accused of laundering an attorney general’s dirty work.In light of the new reporting, it is hard to view Mr. Durham as anything else. Indeed, no one involved in developing these regulations thought that a prosecutor who has regular scotch-sipping sessions with the attorney general would ever be remotely fit for the job. Yet that was the relationship reportedly developed by Mr. Durham and Mr. Barr, who jetted off to Italy as a team, where they learned of a lead about President Trump and potential criminal acts. Mr. Barr gave that investigation, too, to Mr. Durham, where it appears to have died.The regulations were set up to avoid a headless fourth branch of government, and so gave the attorney general the power to discipline or fire a special counsel. The Justice Department inspector general, too, should immediately begin an investigation, as members of Congress have recently requested.The regulations also require Mr. Durham to write a final report outlining his actions. Mr. Garland should call for that report immediately, and if Mr. Durham claims he has some ongoing work to do, he should be told to submit an interim report for Mr. Garland.That report should go into detail about the Italy-focused investigation of Mr. Trump and what the investigators found. And Mr. Garland should scrutinize that report closely, because it certainly appears that we can’t trust Mr. Durham’s prosecutorial judgment. Mr. Barr has said that the Italian tip “was not directly about Trump” and that it “turned out to be a complete nonissue,” but given his and Mr. Durham’s many failures and obfuscations, there is a need for more than Mr. Barr’s word.Remember, Mr. Durham tried to prosecute Michael Sussmann, a former lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but the jury acquitted him. He then tried to prosecute Igor Danchenko about the Steele Dossier, but that prosecution led to an acquittal, too.As many lawyers will tell you, a federal prosecutor almost has to go out of his way to be 0-2 in federal jury trials. Mr. Durham managed to do it. (His only measly conviction was a minor plea for a low-level F.B.I. lawyer.) Still, Mr. Durham’s failures in court do not show a violation of the special counsel regulations. They just show bad judgment.Attorney General William Barr with Donald Trump in front of the Capitol building in 2019.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Garland knows all this, so he should demand a report — though this would not be the sort of report that should be automatically made public. It may very well be that the investigation into Mr. Trump off the Italian lead fizzled because there was nothing to the allegations. If so, Mr. Garland can say that he is refusing to make the report public, but that he has looked into the matter and is satisfied by Mr. Durham’s resolution of it.That, too, is something the special counsel regulations contemplated — they were drafted after the Starr Report and its gratuitous tarnishing of individuals, and so they made clear the special counsel’s report need not be public. (More recently, James Comey tarnished Hillary Clinton in a similar way, underscoring the need for the Justice Department to speak through indictments, not public attacks.)Unfortunately, Mr. Durham and Mr. Barr allowed a misleading narrative to gain traction in public. When news organizations began to report in October 2019 that Mr. Durham’s investigation had morphed from an administrative inquiry into a criminal investigation, creating the misimpression that there might have been criminal wrongdoing by those involved in the Russia investigation, neither man corrected the narrative, even though the real investigation involved Mr. Trump.The Trump administration dealt an awful blow to the notion of a fair investigation. Mr. Trump’s playbook was to relentlessly attack the investigators. Yet foundational to our government is the notion that no one is above the law.Assuming the reporting is accurate, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham behaved in a way that betrayed this bedrock principle. The question of who guards the guardians has plagued democracies since Juvenal. If Mr. Durham were not acting with the independence required for the position, it corrodes the rule of law and opens the door to the perception, if not the reality, of special treatment for the politically powerful.Mr. Garland has the power now to examine the accuracy of the reporting and to take the corrective action necessary to ensure that no adverse precedent is set for future investigations into high-level wrongdoing.Neal K. Katyal is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a co-author, with Sam Koppelman, of “Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump.” He was an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      This Is What Happened When the Authorities Put Trump Under a Microscope

      by

      In retrospect, the Mueller report was a cry for help.“The Office,” as the special counsel so self-effacingly called itself in its report, knew its limits, or at least chose them. It could not indict a sitting president. It was generous with the benefit of the doubt when evaluating a potential “obstructive act” or gauging criminal intent by President Donald Trump. It considered mitigating, and sometimes dubious, explanations for his behavior, and was as restrained in interpreting the president’s misdeeds as it was zealous in listing them.Its conclusion on whether Trump obstructed justice became a Washington classic of needle-threading ambiguity: “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” The Office declined to call Trump a criminal, however much it might have wanted to.Instead, scattered throughout its 448 pages, the Mueller report includes some not-so-subtle instructions and warnings that future investigators, less inhibited, could heed when facing fresh misdeeds.The two highest-profile congressional investigations of Trump that followed — the 2019 report by the House Intelligence Committee on Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine as well as the recently released report by the select committee on the Jan. 6 attack — read like deliberate contrasts to the document produced by Robert Mueller and his team. Their presentation is dramatic, not dense; their conclusions are blunt, not oblique; their arguments are political as much as legal. And yet, the Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports seem to follow the cues, explicit or implied, that the Mueller report left behind.Read together, these three major investigations of the Trump presidency appear in conversation with one another, ever more detailed drafts of a most unorthodox historical record — a history in which these documents are characters as much as chroniclers.The documents try to explain the former president, and they also strain to contain him. The Mueller report inspects the guardrails that Trump bent and sometimes broke. The Ukraine report lays out the case that led to his first impeachment. The Jan. 6 report now declares him “unfit” to return to the nation’s highest office — the very office Trump is again pursuing — or to any office below it.The effect is cumulative. While the Mueller report evaluates Trump’s behavior as a series of individual, unrelated actions, it knows better, stating near the end that the president’s “pattern of conduct as a whole” was vital to grasping his intentions. The Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports took up that task, establishing links among Trump’s varied transgressions.While the Mueller report wonders whether Trump and his advisers committed certain acts “willfully” — that is, “with general knowledge of the illegality of their conduct” — the investigations into his strong-arming of Ukraine and the Capitol assault seek to show that Trump knew that his actions violated the law and that his statements ran counter to the truth.And while the Mueller report grudgingly posits that some of the president’s questionable actions might have been taken with the public, rather than the private, interest in mind, the Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports contend that with Trump, the distinction between public and private always collapsed in favor of the latter.The Mueller report would not declare that the president deserved impeachment or had committed crimes, but it didn’t mind if someone else reached those conclusions. It states plainly that accusing Trump of a crime could “pre-empt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct,” that is, the constitutional process of impeachment, which the Ukraine investigation would soon deliver.The Mueller report also notes in its final pages that “only a successor Administration would be able to prosecute a former President,” which is what the Jan. 6 special committee, with its multiple criminal referrals, has urged the Biden administration’s Justice Department to do.The Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports did their best to answer Mueller’s call.ALL THREE REPORTS INCLUDE quintessentially Trumpian scenes, consistent in their depictions of the former president’s methods, and very much in keeping with numerous journalistic accounts of how he sought to manipulate people, rules and institutions.When the Jan. 6 report shows Trump haranguing Mike Pence, telling the vice president that Pence would be known as a “patriot” if Pence helped overturn the 2020 election, it’s hard not to recall the scene in the Mueller report when the president tells Jeff Sessions that the attorney general would go down as a “hero” if he reversed his recusal from the Russia investigation.All three reports show Trump deploying the mechanisms of government for political gain. Less than four months into his term, Trump relies on a Department of Justice memo as cover to fire the F.B.I. director; he uses the Office of Management and Budget to delay the disbursal of military aid to Ukraine in 2019; and he attempts to use fake state electoral certificates to upend the results of the 2020 vote.Perhaps no moment is more believable than the Ukraine report’s description of Trump’s April 2019 conversation with the newly elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, when Trump makes a point of mentioning that Ukraine is “always very well represented” in the Miss Universe pageants.Still, each investigation offers a slightly different theory of Trump. In the Mueller report, Trump and his aides come across as the gang that can’t cheat straight — too haphazard to effectively coordinate with a foreign government, too ignorant of campaign finance laws to purposely violate them, often comically naïve about the gravity of their plight. When Michael Flynn resigns from the White House after admitting to lying about his contacts with Russian officials, Trump consoles him with the assurance, “We’ll give you a good recommendation,” as if Flynn were a departing mailroom intern rather than a disgraced ex-national security adviser.When the Trump campaign tried to conceal details surrounding its infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016, the Mueller report suggests that the effort “may reflect an intention to avoid political consequences rather than any prior knowledge of illegality,” that is, that the Trump team might have felt just shame, not guilt.The Mueller report rebuts the Trumpian notion that the president can employ his legitimate authority regardless of the illegitimacy of his purpose. “An improper motive can render an actor’s conduct criminal even when the conduct would otherwise be lawful and within the actor’s authority,” the report states, in the patient tone of a parent explaining household rules to a child. But even in the damning sections on Trump’s potential obstruction of justice (in which “the Office” all but states that it would have charged Trump if it could have), the report theorizes that the president may have been attacking the inquiries against him out of concern that they hindered his ability to govern, not because he was hiding some nefarious activity.The Ukraine report, by contrast, regards Trump as more strategic than chaotic, and it does not wallow in the netherworld between the president’s personal benefit and his public service. “The President placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security,” Representative Adam Schiff declares in the report’s preface.The three investigations tell different stories, but the misdeeds all run together, more overlapping than sequential. The president’s effort to squeeze Zelensky’s government into investigating the Biden family (ironically, under the guise of Trump’s anti-corruption concerns) was an attempt to manipulate the 2020 election, while his desire for Ukraine to investigate its own supposed U.S. election interference (on behalf of the Democrats, naturally) was part of Trump’s ongoing battle to defend the glorious memory of his 2016 victory. “We were struck by the fact that the President’s misconduct was not an isolated occurrence, nor was it the product of a naïve president,” Schiff writes. Indeed, several weeks before Trump’s famous phone conversation with Zelensky on July 25, 2019, Trump had already ordered a hold on hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine, which it would dangle as leverage. And the purely political nature of the enterprise was made plain when the report notes that Trump did not care if Ukraine in fact conducted any investigations. It simply had to announce them.The Mueller report argues that “Viewing the [president’s] acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance.” The Ukraine report shows that the conversation that Trump described as “a perfect call” was not the ask; it was the confirmation. When Trump said, “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” Zelensky and his aides had already been notified what was coming. The Ukraine scandal was never about a single call, just like the Jan. 6 report was not about a single day.The Jan. 6 report is the most dramatic — and certainly the most readable — of the three documents. It is vaguely journalistic in style, even adopting the narrative convention of turning memorable quotes into chapter titles, like “I Just Want to Find 11,780 Votes” and “Be There, Will Be Wild!” (Contrast this with the Mueller report’s “Background Legal and Evidentiary Principles” or “Legal Defenses to the Application of Obstruction-of-Justice Statutes to the President,” among its other sexy teasers.) At times, the Jan. 6 report applies too much writerly gloss. When it points out that Trump and his campaign used bogus claims of election fraud after the 2020 vote to raise more than $250 million from supporters, the report says that the Big Lie enabled “the Big Rip-off.” I’m sure someone was proud of that wording, but in this case it is more than enough just to state the facts.The Jan. 6 report takes seriously the admonition to view the president’s actions collectively, not individually; the phrase “multipart plan” appears throughout the report, with Trump as the architect. Several observers of the Trump era have described how the president learned to maneuver his way through the executive branch and grew bolder in his abuses of it; in the Jan. 6 report, that transition is complete. No longer the bumbling, reactive and instinctual occupant of the Oval Office, here Trump is fully in charge — purposely spreading false information about election fraud, pressuring Pence to refuse to certify the Electoral College count, leaning on state and local electoral officials to change the vote totals, summoning tens of thousands of supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, and urging them to march to the Capitol, then standing by for hours as the violent attack was underway. “The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed,” the report concludes.Trump told America that he alone could fix it; the Jan. 6 report tells us that he alone could break it.Even more so than the Ukraine report, the Jan. 6 report repeatedly emphasizes how Trump knew, well, everything. “Donald Trump’s own campaign officials told him early on that his claims of fraud were false,” Liz Cheney, the committee vice chair, writes in her introduction. “Donald Trump’s senior Justice Department officials — each appointed by Donald Trump himself — investigated the allegations and told him repeatedly that his fraud claims were false. Donald Trump’s White House lawyers also told him his fraud claims were false.”There is no room here for the plausible deniability that the Mueller report entertained, for the notion that Trump didn’t know better, or that, in the immortal words of Attorney General William P. Barr when he creatively interpreted the Mueller report to exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice, that the president was “frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency.”This alleged sincerity underscored the president’s “noncorrupt motives,” as Barr put it. In the Jan. 6 report, any case for Trumpian sincerity is eviscerated in a six-page chart in the executive summary, which catalogs the many times the president was informed of the facts of the election yet continued to lie about them. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump told top Department of Justice officials in late December 2020, the report says.Just announce an investigation into the Bidens. Just say the 2020 election was rigged. Trump’s most corrupt action is always the corruption of reality.The Jan. 6 report devotes a chapter to explaining how the president purposely mustered a mob to Washington, how his “will be wild!” call-out on social media united rival extremist groups in a common cause, and how he urged his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell” to obstruct the affirmation of a legitimate vote.Two days before his speech, Trump had already floated the idea to advisers that he would join the protesters at the Capitol, and he even briefly considered deploying 10,000 members of the National Guard “to protect him and his supporters from any supposed threats by left-wing counterprotesters,” the report states.This is among the most remarkable moments in the Jan. 6 chronicle. Rather than worry about violence against lawmakers and the Capitol itself, Trump was focused on protecting his supporters. They interpreted the president’s call to join him in Washington that day as a command to save their country, violently if necessary, and they stood down only when he issued a video instructing them to do so. The Jan. 6 report, in a dramatic but not inaccurate flourish, affirms that, during the assault on the Capitol, Trump “was not only the commander in chief of the U.S. military, but also of the rioters.”On that day, he chose to lead the rioters. Jan. 6 was the closest Trump would get to holding that military parade he so longed to see in Washington. Instead of parading in front of the Capitol, his troops marched against it.AFTER MAKING THE CASE that Trump incited the assault, the Jan. 6 report expresses shock at how little Trump did to stop it, an act of omission it labels a “dereliction of duty.” Yet, by the report’s own logic, why would Trump have stopped the insurrectionists? “President Trump had summoned a mob, including armed extremists and conspiracy theorists, to Washington, D.C. on the day the joint session of Congress was to meet,” the report states. “He then told that same mob to march on the U.S. Capitol and ‘fight.’ They clearly got the message.” (Some variation of the word “fight” appeared only twice in Trump’s prepared speech for his Jan. 6 speech, but the president would utter the word 20 times throughout his remarks, the report notes.) If the rioters were in fact doing his bidding, the president would have no reason to call them off once the mayhem began.That Trump would rile people up and then sit back and watch the outcome on television was the least surprising part of the day. It was how he spent his presidency. In calling out Trump’s failure to act, the Jan. 6 report was imagining that Trump, in that moment, might have become presidential at last, shocked by what his own actions wrought into being something other than himself. In its condemnation of Trump, the report still longed for his transformation. After so many pages, so much testimony, so much analysis, it still struggled to understand him.The challenges of interpreting and describing what another person was thinking, doing or intending at a particular moment — even a person as overanalyzed as Donald J. Trump — comes alive in one passage, or rather, one word, of the Jan. 6 report. The issue is not even the word itself, but the form in which it is rendered.The report cites the testimony of a White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, who explained how, on the morning of Jan. 6, the president was incensed that the presence of magnetometers (used to detect weapons) was inhibiting some armed supporters from entering the Ellipse, where the president was to deliver his speech.As always, Trump wanted a bigger crowd. Hutchinson said she heard him say something like, “I don’t F’ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the F’ing mags away. Let my people in.”They’re not here to hurt me. Which word should one emphasize when uttering that sentence aloud? If it is the verb hurt,” the sentiment would be somewhat benign. They are not here to hurt me, the president might have meant, but to praise or cheer or support me. If the emphasis falls on “me,” however, the meaning is more sinister. They’re not here to hurt me, the implication would be, but to hurt someone else. That someone else could be Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, an officer of the Capitol Police or any of the lawmakers gathering to fulfill their duty and certify Joe Biden as president.So, which was it? The Jan. 6 report confuses matters by italicizing “me” in the document’s final chapter but leaving it unitalicized in the executive summary. The video of Hutchinson’s testimony shows her reciting the line quickly and neutrally, with perhaps a slight emphasis on “hurt” rather than “me.” (You can watch and listen for yourself.)Of course, the less ambiguous interpretation of Trump’s words is that either inflection — whether “hurt” or “me” — still means the president was unconcerned of anyone’s safety but his own. Perhaps “I don’t F’ing care” is the most relevant phrase.With a document surpassing 800 pages, it may seem too much to linger on the typeface of a single two-letter pronoun. But for accounts that can serve as both historical records and briefs for the prosecution, every word and every quote — every framing and every implication — is a choice that deserves scrutiny.The studious restraint of the Mueller report came in for much criticism once the special counsel failed to deliver a dagger to the heart of the Trump presidency and once the document was so easily miscast by interested parties. Even its copious redactions, justified by the opaque phrase “Harm to Ongoing Matter” appearing over a sea of blotted out text, seemed designed to frustrate. Yet, for all its diffidence, there is power in the document’s understated prose, in its methodical collection of evidence, in its unwillingness to overstep its bounds while investigating a president who knew few bounds himself.The Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports came at a time when Trump’s misconduct was better understood, when Mueller-like restraint was less in fashion, and when those attempting to hold the chief executive accountable grasped every tool at hand. For all their passion and bluntness, they encountered their own constraints, limits that are likely inherent to the form, to the challenge of recording on paper and by committee the impulses not just of a man but of an era with which he became synonymous.Expectations are heaped upon these reports, not only for what they might reveal, but for what those revelations might unleash, or what they might help repair. Such demands are excessive and probably counterproductive. It is hard enough to determine the true meaning of a lone word, to reconstruct a fleeting moment in history. It is harder still to reconstruct a nation’s political life, that other ongoing matter to which so much harm has been done.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Barr Pressed Durham to Find Flaws in the Trump-Russia Investigation

      by

      The review by John Durham at one point veered into a criminal investigation related to Donald Trump himself, even as it failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry.WASHINGTON — It became a regular litany of grievances from President Donald J. Trump and his supporters: The investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia was a witch hunt, they maintained, that had been opened without any solid basis, went on too long and found no proof of collusion.Egged on by Mr. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Mr. Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John H. Durham, and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Mr. Trump left office.But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Mr. Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr.Moreover, a monthslong review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.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.)Now, as Mr. Durham works on a final report, the interviews by The Times provide new details of how he and Mr. Barr sought to recast the scrutiny of the 2016 Trump campaign’s myriad if murky links to Russia as unjustified and itself a crime.Mr. Barr, Mr. Durham and Ms. Dannehy declined to comment. The current and former officials who discussed the investigation all spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal, political and intelligence sensitivities surrounding the topic.A year into the Durham inquiry, Mr. Barr declared that the attempt “to get to the bottom of what happened” in 2016 “cannot be, and it will not be, a tit-for-tat exercise. We are not going to lower the standards just to achieve a result.”But Robert Luskin, a criminal defense lawyer and former Justice Department prosecutor who represented two witnesses Mr. Durham interviewed, said that he had a hard time squaring Mr. Durham’s prior reputation as an independent-minded straight shooter with his end-of-career conduct as Mr. Barr’s special counsel.“This stuff has my head spinning,” Mr. Luskin said. “When did these guys drink the Kool-Aid, and who served it to them?”Attorney General William P. Barr took office in 2019 with suspicions about the origins of the Russia investigation.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAn Odd CoupleA month after Mr. Barr was confirmed as attorney general in February 2019, the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III ended the Russia investigation and turned in his report without charging any Trump associates with engaging in a criminal conspiracy with Moscow over its covert operation to help Mr. Trump win the 2016 election.Mr. Trump would repeatedly portray the Mueller report as having found “no collusion with Russia.” The reality was more complex. In fact, the report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” and it established both how Moscow had worked to help Mr. Trump win and how his campaign had expected to benefit from the foreign interference.That spring, Mr. Barr assigned Mr. Durham to scour the origins of the Russia investigation for wrongdoing, telling Fox News that he wanted to know if “officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale” in deciding to pursue the investigation. “A lot of the answers have been inadequate, and some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together,” he added.While attorneys general overseeing politically sensitive inquiries tend to keep their distance from the investigators, Mr. Durham visited Mr. Barr in his office for at times weekly updates and consultations about his day-to-day work. They also sometimes dined and sipped Scotch together, people familiar with their work said.In some ways, they were an odd match. Taciturn and media-averse, the goateed Mr. Durham had spent more than three decades as a prosecutor before Mr. Trump appointed him the U.S. attorney for Connecticut. Administrations of both parties had assigned him to investigate potential official wrongdoing, like allegations of corrupt ties between mafia informants and F.B.I. agents, and the C.I.A.’s torture of terrorism detainees and destruction of evidence.By contrast, the vocal and domineering Mr. Barr has never prosecuted a case and is known for using his law enforcement platform to opine on culture-war issues and politics. He had effectively auditioned to be Mr. Trump’s attorney general by asserting to a New York Times reporter that there was more basis to investigate Mrs. Clinton than Mr. Trump’s “so-called ‘collusion’” with Russia, and by writing a memo suggesting a way to shield Mr. Trump from scrutiny for obstruction of justice.But the two shared a worldview: They are both Catholic conservatives and Republicans, born two months apart in 1950. As a career federal prosecutor, Mr. Durham already revered the office of the attorney general, people who know him say. And as he was drawn into Mr. Barr’s personal orbit, Mr. Durham came to embrace that particular attorney general’s intense feelings about the Russia investigation.President Donald J. Trump openly suggested that Mr. Durham should charge his adversaries with crimes.Doug Mills/The New York Times‘The Thinnest of Suspicions’At the time Mr. Barr was confirmed, he told aides that he already suspected that intelligence abuses played a role in igniting the Russia investigation — and that unearthing any wrongdoing would be a priority.In May 2019, soon after giving Mr. Durham his assignment, Mr. Barr summoned the head of the National Security Agency, Paul M. Nakasone, to his office. In front of several aides, Mr. Barr demanded that the N.S.A. cooperate with the Durham inquiry.Referring to the C.I.A. and British spies, Mr. Barr also said he suspected that the N.S.A.’s “friends” had helped instigate the Russia investigation by targeting the Trump campaign, aides briefed on the meeting said. And repeating a sexual vulgarity, he warned that if the N.S.A. wronged him by not doing all it could to help Mr. Durham, Mr. Barr would do the same to the agency.Mr. Barr’s insistence about what he had surmised bewildered intelligence officials. But Mr. Durham spent his first months looking for any evidence that the origin of the Russia investigation involved an intelligence operation targeting the Trump campaign.Mr. Durham’s team spent long hours combing the C.I.A.’s files but found no way to support the allegation. Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham traveled abroad together to press British and Italian officials to reveal everything their agencies had gleaned about the Trump campaign and relayed to the United States, but both allied governments denied they had done any such thing. Top British intelligence officials expressed indignation to their U.S. counterparts about the accusation, three former U.S. officials said.Mr. Durham and Mr. Barr had not yet given up when a new problem arose: In early December, the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, completed his own report on the origins of the Russia investigation.The inspector general revealed errors and omissions in wiretap applications targeting a former Trump campaign adviser and determined that an F.B.I. lawyer had doctored an email in a way that kept one of those problems from coming to light. (Mr. Durham’s team later negotiated a guilty plea by that lawyer.)But the broader findings contradicted Mr. Trump’s accusations and the rationale for Mr. Durham’s inquiry. Mr. Horowitz found no evidence that F.B.I. actions were politically motivated. And he concluded that the investigation’s basis — an Australian diplomat’s tip that a Trump campaign adviser had seemed to disclose advance knowledge that Russia would release hacked Democratic emails — had been sufficient to lawfully open it.Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, found no evidence that the F.B.I.’s actions in opening the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia were politically motivated.Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesThe week before Mr. Horowitz released the report, he and aides came to Mr. Durham’s offices — nondescript suites on two floors of a building in northeast Washington — to go over it.Mr. Durham lobbied Mr. Horowitz to drop his finding that the diplomat’s tip had been sufficient for the F.B.I. to open its “full” counterintelligence investigation, arguing that it was enough at most for a “preliminary” inquiry, according to officials. But Mr. Horowitz did not change his mind.That weekend, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided to weigh in publicly to shape the narrative on their terms.Minutes before the inspector general’s report went online, Mr. Barr issued a statement contradicting Mr. Horowitz’s major finding, declaring that the F.B.I. opened the investigation “on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient.” He would later tell Fox News that the investigation began “without any basis,” as if the diplomat’s tip never happened.Mr. Trump also weighed in, telling reporters that the details of the inspector general’s report were “far worse than anything I would have even imagined,” adding: “I look forward to the Durham report, which is coming out in the not-too-distant future. It’s got its own information, which is this information plus, plus, plus.”And the Justice Department sent reporters a statement from Mr. Durham that clashed with both Justice Department principles about not discussing ongoing investigations and his personal reputation as particularly tight-lipped. He said he disagreed with Mr. Horowitz’s conclusions about the Russia investigation’s origins, citing his own access to more information and “evidence collected to date.”But as Mr. Durham’s inquiry proceeded, he never presented any evidence contradicting Mr. Horowitz’s factual findings about the basis on which F.B.I. officials opened the investigation.By summer 2020, it was clear that the hunt for evidence supporting Mr. Barr’s hunch about intelligence abuses had failed. But he waited until after the 2020 election to publicly concede that there had turned out to be no sign of “foreign government activity” and that the C.I.A. had “stayed in its lane” after all.Mr. Barr later wrote that his relationship with Mr. Trump eroded because his “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election.”Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesAn Awkward TipOn one of Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham’s trips to Europe, according to people familiar with the matter, Italian officials — while denying any role in setting off the Russia investigation — unexpectedly offered a potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes.Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore. But rather than assign it to another prosecutor, Mr. Barr had Mr. Durham investigate the matter himself — giving him criminal prosecution powers for the first time — even though the possible wrongdoing by Mr. Trump did not fall squarely within Mr. Durham’s assignment to scrutinize the origins of the Russia inquiry, the people said.Mr. Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned and whether anyone at the White House ever found out. The extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Mr. Trump has remained secret..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.But in October 2019, a garbled echo became public. The Times reported that Mr. Durham’s administrative review of the Russia inquiry had evolved to include a criminal investigation, while saying it was not clear what the suspected crime was. Citing their own sources, many other news outlets confirmed the development.The news reports, however, were all framed around the erroneous assumption that the criminal investigation must mean Mr. Durham had found evidence of potential crimes by officials involved in the Russia inquiry. Mr. Barr, who weighed in publicly about the Durham inquiry at regular intervals in ways that advanced a pro-Trump narrative, chose in this instance not to clarify what was really happening.By the spring and summer of 2020, with Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign in full swing, the Durham investigation’s “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election” began to erode Mr. Barr’s relationship with Mr. Trump, Mr. Barr wrote in his memoir.Mr. Trump was stoking a belief among his supporters that Mr. Durham might charge former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. That proved too much for Mr. Barr, who in May 2020 clarified that “our concern of potential criminality is focused on others.”Even so, in August, Mr. Trump lashed out in a Fox interview, asserting that Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden, along with top F.B.I. and intelligence officials, had been caught in “the single biggest political crime in the history of our country” and the only thing stopping charges would be if Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham wanted to be “politically correct.”Against that backdrop, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham did not shut down their inquiry when the search for intelligence abuses hit a dead end. With the inspector general’s inquiry complete, they turned to a new rationale: a hunt for a basis to accuse the Clinton campaign of conspiring to defraud the government by manufacturing the suspicions that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, along with scrutinizing what the F.B.I. and intelligence officials knew about the Clinton campaign’s actions.Mr. Durham also developed an indirect method to impute political bias to law enforcement officials: comparing the Justice Department’s aggressive response to suspicions of links between Mr. Trump and Russia with its more cautious and skeptical reaction to various Clinton-related suspicions.He examined an investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s finances in which the F.B.I.’s repeated requests for a subpoena were denied. He also scrutinized how the F.B.I. gave Mrs. Clinton a “defensive briefing” about suspicions that a foreign government might be trying to influence her campaign through donations, but did not inform Mr. Trump about suspicions that Russia might be conspiring with people associated with his campaign.The Durham inquiry looked for evidence that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign had conspired to frame Donald J. Trump.Doug mills/The New York TimesDubious IntelligenceDuring the Russia investigation, the F.B.I. used claims from what turned out to be a dubious source, the Steele dossier — opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign — in its botched applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign aide.The Durham investigation did something with parallels to that incident.In Mr. Durham’s case, the dubious sources were memos, whose credibility the intelligence community doubted, written by Russian intelligence analysts and discussing purported conversations involving American victims of Russian hacking, according to people familiar with the matter.The memos were part of a trove provided to the C.I.A. by a Dutch spy agency, which had infiltrated the servers of its Russian counterpart. The memos were said to make demonstrably inconsistent, inaccurate or exaggerated claims, and some U.S. analysts believed Russia may have deliberately seeded them with disinformation.Mr. Durham wanted to use the memos, which included descriptions of Americans discussing a purported plan by Mrs. Clinton to attack Mr. Trump by linking him to Russia’s hacking and releasing in 2016 of Democratic emails, to pursue the theory that the Clinton campaign conspired to frame Mr. Trump. And in doing so, Mr. Durham sought to use the memos as justification to get access to the private communications of an American citizen.One purported hacking victim identified in the memos was Leonard Benardo, the executive vice president of the Open Society Foundations, a pro-democracy organization whose Hungarian-born founder, Mr. Soros, has been vilified by the far right.In 2017, The Washington Post reported that the Russian memos included a claim that Mr. Benardo and a Democratic member of Congress, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, had discussed how Loretta E. Lynch, the Obama-era attorney general, had supposedly promised to keep the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails from going too far.But Mr. Benardo and Ms. Wasserman Schultz said they had never even met, let alone communicated about Mrs. Clinton’s emails.Mr. Durham set out to prove that the memos described real conversations, according to people familiar with the matter. He sent a prosecutor on his team, Andrew DeFilippis, to ask Judge Beryl A. Howell, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, for an order allowing them to seize information about Mr. Benardo’s emails.But Judge Howell decided that the Russian memo was too weak a basis to intrude on Mr. Benardo’s privacy, they said. Mr. Durham then personally appeared before her and urged her to reconsider, but she again ruled against him.Rather than dropping the idea, Mr. Durham sidestepped Judge Howell’s ruling by invoking grand-jury power to demand documents and testimony directly from Mr. Soros’s foundation and Mr. Benardo about his emails, the people said. (It is unclear whether Mr. Durham served them with a subpoena or instead threatened to do so if they did not cooperate.)Rather than fighting in court, the foundation and Mr. Benardo quietly complied, according to people familiar with the matter. But for Mr. Durham, the result appears to have been another dead end.In a statement provided to The Times by Mr. Soros’s foundation, Mr. Benardo reiterated that he never met or corresponded with Ms. Wasserman Schultz, and said that “if such documentation exists, it’s of course made up.”Nora R. Dannehy in 2009. A longtime aide to Mr. Durham, Ms. Dannehy resigned from his team in 2020 after disputes with him over prosecutorial ethics.Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesInternal StrifeAs the focus of the Durham investigation shifted, cracks formed inside the team. Mr. Durham’s deputy, Ms. Dannehy, a longtime close colleague, increasingly argued with him in front of other prosecutors and F.B.I. agents about legal ethics.Ms. Dannehy had independent standing as a respected prosecutor. In 2008, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey assigned her to investigate whether to charge senior Bush administration officials with crimes related to a scandal over the firing of U.S. attorneys; she decided in 2010 that no charges were warranted.Now, Ms. Dannehy complained to Mr. Durham about how Mr. Barr kept hinting darkly in public about the direction of their investigation. In April 2020, for example, he suggested to Fox News that officials could be prosecuted, saying that “the evidence shows that we are not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here.”Ms. Dannehy urged Mr. Durham to ask the attorney general to adhere to Justice Department policy and not discuss the investigation publicly. But Mr. Durham proved unwilling to challenge him.The strains grew when Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to go after Mr. Benardo’s emails. Ms. Dannehy opposed that tactic and told colleagues that Mr. Durham had taken that step without telling her.By summer 2020, with Election Day approaching, Mr. Barr pressed Mr. Durham to draft a potential interim report centered on the Clinton campaign and F.B.I. gullibility or willful blindness.On Sept. 10, 2020, Ms. Dannehy discovered that other members of the team had written a draft report that Mr. Durham had not told her about, according to people briefed on their ensuing argument.Ms. Dannehy erupted, according to people familiar with the matter. She told Mr. Durham that no report should be issued before the investigation was complete and especially not just before an election — and denounced the draft for taking disputed information at face value. She sent colleagues a memo detailing those concerns and resigned.Cracks formed in Mr. Durham’s team as the scope of his investigation shifted. Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated PressTwo people close to Mr. Barr said he had pressed for the draft to evaluate what a report on preliminary findings would look like and what evidence would need to be declassified. But they insisted that he intended any release to come during the summer or after the Nov. 3 election — not soon before Election Day.In any case, in late September 2020, about two weeks after Ms. Dannehy quit, someone leaked to a Fox Business personality that Mr. Durham would not issue any interim report, disappointing Trump supporters hoping for a pre-Election Day bombshell.Stymied by the decision not to issue an interim Durham report, John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s national intelligence director, tried another way to inject some of the same information into the campaign.Over the objections of Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, Mr. Ratcliffe declassified nearly 1,000 pages of intelligence material before the election for Mr. Durham to use. Notably, in that fight, Mr. Barr sided with Ms. Haspel on one matter that is said to be particularly sensitive and that remained classified, according to two people familiar with the dispute.Mr. Ratcliffe also disclosed in a letter to a senator that “Russian intelligence analysis” claimed that on July 26, 2016, Mrs. Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal tying Mr. Trump to Russia.The letter acknowledged that officials did “not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” But it did not mention that there were many reasons that suspicions about the Trump campaign were arising in that period — like the diplomat’s tip, Mr. Trump’s flattery of President Vladimir V. Putin, his hiring of advisers with links to Russia, his financial ties to Russia and his call for Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton.The disclosure infuriated Dutch intelligence officials, who had provided the memos under strictest confidence.Mr. Durham accused Michael Sussmann of lying in a meeting with an F.B.I. official. He was acquitted.Samuel Corum for The New York Times‘Fanning the Flames’Late in the summer of 2021, Mr. Durham prepared to indict Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer who had represented Democrats in their dealings with the F.B.I. about Russia’s hacking of their emails. Two prosecutors on Mr. Durham’s team — Anthony Scarpelli and Neeraj N. Patel — objected, according to people familiar with the matter.Five years earlier, Mr. Sussmann had relayed a tip to the bureau about odd internet data that a group of data scientists contended could reflect hidden communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank of Russia. The F.B.I., which by then had already launched its Russia investigation, briefly looked at the allegation but dismissed it.Mr. Durham accused Mr. Sussmann of lying to an F.B.I. official by saying he was not conveying the tip for a client; the prosecutor maintained Mr. Sussmann was there in part for the Clinton campaign.Mr. Scarpelli and Mr. Patel argued to Mr. Durham that the evidence was too thin to charge Mr. Sussmann and that such a case would not normally be prosecuted, people familiar with the matter said. Given the intense scrutiny it would receive, they also warned that an acquittal would undermine public faith in their investigation and federal law enforcement.When Mr. Durham did not change course, Mr. Scarpelli quit in protest, people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Patel left soon after to take a different job. Both declined to comment.The charge against Mr. Sussmann was narrow, but the Durham team used it to make public large amounts of information insinuating what Mr. Durham never charged: that Clinton campaign associates conspired to gin up an F.B.I. investigation into Mr. Trump based on a knowingly false allegation.Trial testimony, however, showed that while Mrs. Clinton and her campaign manager hoped Mr. Sussmann would persuade reporters to write articles about Alfa Bank, they did not want him to take the information to the F.B.I. And prosecutors presented no evidence that he or campaign officials had believed the data scientists’ complex theory was false.After Mr. Sussmann’s acquittal, Mr. Barr, by then out of office for more than a year, suggested that using the courts to advance a politically charged narrative was a goal in itself. Mr. Durham “accomplished something far more important” than a conviction, Mr. Barr told Fox News, asserting that the case had “crystallized the central role played by the Hillary campaign in launching as a dirty trick the whole Russiagate collusion narrative and fanning the flames of it.”And he predicted that a subsequent trial, concerning a Russia analyst who was a researcher for the Steele dossier, would also “get the story out” and “further amplify these themes and the role the F.B.I. leadership played in this, which is increasingly looking fishy and inexplicable.”Mr. Durham’s prosecution of Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who was a researcher for the Steele dossier, ended in acquittal.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesThat case involved Igor Danchenko, who had told the F.B.I. that the dossier exaggerated the credibility of gossip and speculation. Mr. Durham charged him with lying about two sources. He was acquitted, too.The two failed cases are likely to be Mr. Durham’s last courtroom acts as a prosecutor. Bringing demonstrably weak cases stood in contrast to how he once talked about his prosecutorial philosophy.James Farmer, a retired prosecutor who worked with Mr. Durham on several major investigations, recalled him as a neutral actor who said that if there were nothing to charge, they would not strain to prosecute. “That’s what I heard, time and again,” Mr. Farmer said.Delivering the closing arguments in the Danchenko trial, Mr. Durham defended his investigation to the jury, denying that his appointment by Mr. Barr had been tainted by politics.He asserted that Mr. Mueller had concluded “there’s no evidence of collusion here or conspiracy” — a formulation that echoed Mr. Trump’s distortion of the Russia investigation’s complex findings — and added: “Is it the wrong question to ask, well, then how did this get started? Respectfully, that’s not the case.”The judge interrupted him: “You should finish up, Mr. Durham.”William K. Rashbaum More

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      Jury Begins Deliberating in Trial of Analyst Who Gathered Steele Dossier Claims

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      The case is a major test of the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed in 2019 to investigate the origins of the F.B.I.’s inquiry into the nature of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A Trump-era special prosecutor and a defense lawyer delivered starkly clashing views in closing arguments on Monday about the motives of Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who was a key contributor to the so-called Steele dossier.A jury will now decide whether Mr. Danchenko is guilty of lying to the F.B.I. about one of his sources for information in the Steele dossier, a compendium of unsubstantiated assertions that Donald J. Trump and his 2016 campaign were colluding with Russia.The case is a major test of the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed in 2019 to investigate the origins of the F.B.I.’s inquiry into the nature of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. An earlier indictment brought by Mr. Durham ended with an acquittal in May, and the trial appears to be his last chance to obtain a conviction in a case he developed.In the closing arguments, a prosecutor working for Mr. Durham asserted that Mr. Danchenko had clearly lied to the F.B.I. and that his false assertions had a material effect. He pointed to part of the dossier that the F.B.I. cited to bolster applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser with ties to Russia.“This defendant’s lies caused intensive surveillance on a U.S. citizen,” said Michael Keilty, an assistant special counsel.In his own remarks, Mr. Durham sought to broaden the case, telling jurors that “the whole house of cards of the dossier crumbles” under the weight of the evidence.But the defense said the government’s own evidence showed that Mr. Danchenko did not lie. The lawyer, Stuart A. Sears, characterized Mr. Danchenko as a valuable and honest asset to the F.B.I. who unwittingly became embroiled in a politically charged investigation. Mr. Durham, he said, was intent on proving crimes “at any cost” and presumed Mr. Danchenko guilty from the start.What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Judge Narrows Trial of Analyst Who Gathered Steele Dossier Claims About Trump

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      Matters deemed tangential to the charges of making false statements, including a notorious and uncorroborated rumor of a sex tape, will be excluded from the case.WASHINGTON — John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel, set off political reverberations last year when he unveiled a lengthy indictment of an analyst he accused of lying to the F.B.I. about sources for the so-called Steele dossier, a discredited compendium of political opposition research about purported ties between Donald J. Trump and Russia.But the trial of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, which opens on Tuesday with jury selection in federal court in Alexandria, Va., now appears likely to be shorter and less politically salient than the sprawling narrative in Mr. Durham’s indictment had suggested the proceeding would be.In an 18-page order last week, the judge overseeing the case, Anthony J. Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia, excluded from the trial large amounts of information that Mr. Durham had wanted to showcase — including material that undercuts the credibility of the dossier’s notorious rumor that Russia had a blackmail tape of Mr. Trump with prostitutes.Certain facts Mr. Durham dug up related to that rumor “do not qualify as direct evidence as they are not ‘inextricably intertwined’ or ‘necessary to provide context’ to the relevant charge,” Judge Trenga wrote, adding that they “were substantially outweighed by the danger of confusion and unfair prejudice.”In that and other disputes over evidence, Judge Trenga, a George W. Bush appointee, almost always sided with Mr. Danchenko’s defense lawyers. Mr. Durham, they said, had tried to inject irrelevant issues into the trial in “an unnecessary and impermissible attempt to make this case about more than it is.”Judge Trenga’s ruling has pared down the larger significance of the trial, which is likely to be Mr. Durham’s final courtroom act before he retires as a longtime prosecutor. The grand jury that Mr. Durham has used to hear evidence has expired, suggesting he will bring no further indictments.Mr. Durham is also writing a report to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who succeeded the Trump administration official who appointed him as special counsel, William P. Barr.Judge Trenga’s ruling has pared down the significance of the trial, which is likely to be John H. Durham’s final courtroom act before he retires as a longtime prosecutor.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesThe dossier, which is at the heart of the Danchenko trial, attracted significant public attention when BuzzFeed published it in January 2017. Mr. Trump and his supporters frequently try to conflate it with the official Russia inquiry or falsely claim that it was the basis for the F.B.I.’s investigation.But the F.B.I. did not open the investigation based on the dossier, and the final report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, did not cite anything in it as evidence. The F.B.I. did cite some claims from the dossier in applying for court permission to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser with ties to Russia.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsElection Fraud Claims: A new report says that major social media companies continue to fuel false conspiracies about election fraud despite promises to combat misinformation ahead of the midterm elections.Russian Falsehoods: Kremlin conspiracy theories blaming the West for disrupting the global food supply have bled into right-wing chat rooms and mainstream conservative news media in the United States.Media Literacy Efforts: As young people spend more time online, educators are increasingly trying to offer students tools and strategies to protect themselves from false narratives.Global Threat: New research shows that nearly three-quarters of respondents across 19 countries with advanced economies are very concerned about false information online.The dossier grew out of opposition research indirectly funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Their law firm, Perkins Coie, contracted with the research firm Fusion GPS, which subcontracted research about Trump business dealings in Russia to a company run by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent.Mr. Steele in turn subcontracted to Mr. Danchenko, a Russian-born analyst living in the United States, who canvassed people he knew, including in Europe and Russia. Mr. Danchenko verbally relayed what the analyst later called “raw intelligence” — essentially uncorroborated gossip — to Mr. Steele, who drafted the dossier.A bureau counterintelligence analyst determined Mr. Danchenko’s identity and the F.B.I. first spoke to him in early 2017, during which he said he had not seen the dossier until BuzzFeed published it. Its tenor was more conclusive than was justified, he said, and he portrayed the blackmail tape story as mere rumor and speculation.Mr. Danchenko talked to the F.B.I. for hours about what he had gathered, and court filings by Mr. Durham disclosed that the bureau formally deemed him a confidential human source.An inspector general report revealed in late 2019 that Mr. Danchenko’s interview had raised doubts about the credibility of the dossier and criticized the bureau for failing to tell that to a court in wiretap renewal applications that continued to cite it. The report essentially portrayed Mr. Danchenko, whom it did not name, as a truth-teller, and the F.B.I. as deceptive.But after further investigation, Mr. Durham accused Mr. Danchenko of deceiving the F.B.I. — including by concealing that a public relations executive with ties to Democrats, Charles Dolan, had been his source for a minor claim involving office politics in the Trump campaign. That assertion made its way into the dossier.At the trial, Mr. Danchenko’s defense will apparently be that the F.B.I. asked him whether he had ever “talked” to Mr. Dolan about information in the dossier and that his somewhat equivocal denial was true: They had instead communicated by writing about that topic.Mr. Danchenko is accused of making false statements to the F.B.I.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesDefense lawyers had asked Judge Trenga to throw out the charge, arguing that the particular statute Mr. Danchenko had been charged with covers only affirmative misstatements, not misleading omissions. The judge has characterized that issue as a close call but let it go forward, while suggesting he could revisit the question later.Mr. Durham had also wanted to present striking but inconclusive evidence: In the summer of 2016, when Mr. Danchenko went to Moscow to gather rumors like the one about a purported sex tape, Mr. Dolan was staying at the hotel where the tape had supposedly been filmed three years earlier — and toured the suite where Mr. Trump had stayed.But Mr. Dolan told Mr. Durham’s team that he had never heard the tape rumor until BuzzFeed published the dossier, and Mr. Durham did not claim that Mr. Dolan was a source of the rumor. The judge excluded that information from the trial as irrelevant to the false statements Mr. Danchenko is charged with making.Mr. Durham also brought four false-statement charges against Mr. Danchenko related to accusations that he lied to the F.B.I. about a person he said had called and provided information without identifying himself.Mr. Danchenko told the F.B.I. he believed the caller had probably been Sergei Millian, a former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, but Mr. Durham contends that is a lie and Mr. Danchenko never believed that.Like Mr. Steele, Mr. Millian is abroad; he refused to come to the United States to be a witness at the trial. The judge has also ruled inadmissible two emails Mr. Millian apparently wrote about Mr. Danchenko in 2020 denying that he talked to Mr. Danchenko.The “emails lack the necessary ‘guarantees of trustworthiness’ as the government does not offer direct evidence that Millian actually wrote the emails, and, even if he did, Millian possessed opportunity and motive to fabricate and/or misrepresent his thoughts,” the judge wrote.After Mr. Durham was assigned to investigate the Russia investigation in the spring of 2019, Mr. Trump and his supporters stoked expectations that Mr. Durham would uncover a “deep state” conspiracy against him and charge high-level F.B.I. and intelligence officials with crimes.But instead, Mr. Durham developed two cases on narrow charges of false statements involving outside efforts to uncover links between Mr. Trump and Russia. One was against Michael Sussmann, a lawyer with Democratic ties who was acquitted of lying to the F.B.I. when he shared a tip about possible connections between Mr. Trump and Russia. Another was against Mr. Danchenko.Mr. Durham filled court filings with copious amounts of information seemingly extraneous to the charges, while insinuating that Democrats had conspired to frame Mr. Trump for colluding with Russia.While that was not the theoretical conspiracy Mr. Trump and his supporters at outlets like Fox News had originally focused on, Mr. Durham’s filings provided fodder for them to stoke grievances about the Russia investigation. But judges in both cases have proved skeptical about putting much of that material before a jury.In both instances, however, Mr. Durham’s earlier filings had already made that information public.Mr. Danchenko was the subject of a counterintelligence investigation more than a decade ago, after the F.B.I. received a tip that he had made a remark that someone interpreted as an offer to buy classified information. He had also had contact with someone at the Russian embassy believed to be an intelligence officer. The bureau closed the case in 2011 without charging him.Mr. Danchenko — who made his name as a Russia analyst by bringing to light evidence that President Vladimir V. Putin likely plagiarized parts of his dissertation — has denied being a Russian agent and said he has no memory of the purported remark. For now, the judge has barred Mr. Durham’s team from introducing details about that inquiry, although prosecutors can tell the jury that there had been one.In an interview last month with the conservative Washington Examiner, Mr. Barr suggested that despite the special counsel’s limited achievements in the courtroom, the investigation was a success from another point of view.“I think Durham got out a lot of important facts that fill in a lot of the blanks as to what was really happening,” Mr. Barr said, adding that he expected “the Danchenko trial will also allow for a lot of this story to be told, whether or not he’s ultimately convicted.” More