Russian Interference in 2016 US Elections and Ties to Trump Associates

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      Do You Know a Politically Motived Prosecution When You See One?

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      As the criminal indictments of Donald Trump continue to pile up like boxes in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, the former president’s defenders have settled on a response: They don’t claim their man is innocent of the scores of federal and state charges against him — a tough case to make under the circumstances. Instead they accuse the Biden administration and Democratic prosecutors of politicizing law enforcement and cooking up an insurance policy to protect President Biden, who trails Mr. Trump in some polls about a very possible 2024 rematch.“So what do they do now?” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy asked last week, after Mr. Trump announced that he had received a second target letter from the special counsel Jack Smith, this time over his role in the Jan. 6 attack. “Weaponize government to go after their No. 1 opponent.”Gov. Ron DeSantis, one of the few plausible Republican nominees besides Mr. Trump, warned that the government is “criminalizing political differences.”It’s not only about Mr. Trump; griping about politicized law enforcement has become a cottage industry on the right these days. No sooner did Republicans take back the House of Representatives than they formed a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which meets regularly to air grievances and grill witnesses about their supposed anti-conservative animus, including Christopher Wray, the (Trump-nominated) F.B.I. director.If you’re feeling bewildered by all the claims and counterclaims of politicization, you’re not alone. Take the F.B.I.’s probe of ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign, which is still being hashed out in the halls of Congress seven years later: In February, Democratic lawmakers demanded an investigation of the investigators who investigated the investigators who were previously investigated for their investigation of a transnational plot to interfere in a presidential election. Got that?But even if the charge of politicized justice is levied by a bad-faith buffoon like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the weaponization subcommittee, it is a profoundly important one. There is no simple way to separate politics completely from law enforcement. The Justice Department will always be led by a political appointee, and most state and local prosecutors are elected. If Americans are going to have faith in the fairness of their justice system, every effort must be taken to assure the public that political motives are not infecting prosecutors’ charging decisions. That means extremely clear rules for investigators and prosecutors and eternal vigilance for the rest of us.At the same time, politically powerful people must be held to the same rules as everyone else, even if they happen to be of a different party from those investigating them. So how to distinguish an investigation or prosecution based solely on the facts from one motivated improperly by politics?Sometimes the investigators make it easy by just coming out and admitting that it’s really political. Mr. McCarthy did that in 2015, when he bragged on Fox News that the House Benghazi hearings had knocked a seemingly “unbeatable” Hillary Clinton down in the polls. More recently, James Comer of Kentucky, who heads the House committee that is relentlessly investigating Hunter Biden, made a similar argument about the effect of the committee’s work on President Biden’s political fortunes. (Mr. Comer tried to walk back his comment a day later.)More often, though, it takes some work to determine whether an investigation or prosecution is on the level.The key thing to remember is that even if the subject is a politically powerful person or the outcome of a trial could have a political impact, that doesn’t necessarily mean the action itself is political. To assume otherwise is to “immunize all high-ranking powerful political people from ever being held accountable for the wrongful things they do,” said Kristy Parker, a lawyer with the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “And if you do that, you subvert the idea that this is a rule-of-law society where everybody is subject to equal justice, and at the same time you remove from the public the ability to impose any accountability for misconduct, which enables it to happen again.”In May, Protect Democracy published a very useful report, co-written by Ms. Parker, laying out several factors that help the public assess whether a prosecution is political.First, what is the case about? Is there straightforward evidence of criminal behavior by a politician? Have people who are not powerful politicians been prosecuted in the past for similar behavior?Second, what are top law-enforcement officials saying? Is the president respecting due process, or is he demanding investigations or prosecutions of specific people? Is he keeping his distance from the case, or is he publicly attacking prosecutors, judges and jurors? Is the attorney general staying quiet, or is he offering public opinions on the guilt of the accused?Third, is the Justice Department following its internal procedures and guidelines for walling off political interference? Most of these guidelines arose in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, during which President Richard Nixon ordered the department to go after his political enemies and later obstructed the investigation into his own behavior. Until recently, the guidelines were observed by presidents and attorneys general of both parties.Finally, how have other institutions responded? Did judges and juries follow proper procedure in the case, and did they agree that the defendant was guilty? Did an agency’s inspector general find any wrongdoing by investigators or prosecutors?None of these factors are decisive by themselves. An investigation might take a novel legal approach; an honest case may still lose in court. But considering them together makes it easier to identify when law enforcement has been weaponized for political ends.To see how it works in practice, let’s take a closer look at two recent examples: first, the federal investigations into Mr. Trump’s withholding of classified documents and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and, second, the investigation by John Durham into the F.B.I.’s Russia probe.In the first example, the Justice Department and the F.B.I., under Attorney General Merrick Garland, waited more than a year to pursue an investigation of Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack with any urgency — largely out of the fear that they would be seen as politically motivated.With a punctiliousness that has exasperated many liberals, Mr. Garland has kept his mouth shut about Mr. Smith’s prosecutions, except to say that the department would pursue anyone responsible for the Jan. 6 attack. Mr. Garland almost never mentions Mr. Trump by name. And Mr. Smith has been silent outside of the news conference he held last month to announce the charges in the documents case.In that case, Mr. Smith presented a tower of evidence that Mr. Trump violated multiple federal laws. There are also many examples of nonpowerful people — say, Reality Winner — who were prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to years in prison for leaking a single classified document. Mr. Trump kept dozens. Even a federal judge who was earlier accused of being too accommodating to Mr. Trump has effectively signaled the documents case is legitimate, setting a trial date for May and refusing the Trump team’s demand to delay it until after the 2024 election.In the Jan. 6 case, the government has already won convictions against hundreds of people for their roles in the Capitol attack, many involving some of the same laws identified in Mr. Smith’s latest target letter to Mr. Trump.“Prosecutors will hear all sorts of allegations that it’s all political, that it will damage the republic for all of history,” Ms. Parker, who previously worked as a federal prosecutor, told me. “But they have to charge through that if what they’ve got is a case that on the facts and law would be brought against anybody else.”President Biden’s behavior has been more of a mixed bag. He and his advisers are keen to advertise his disciplined silence about Mr. Trump’s legal travails. “I have never once — not one single time — suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do,” he said in June. Yet he has commented publicly and inappropriately on both investigations over the years.It’s impossible to justify these remarks, but it is possible to consider them in light of the other factors above and to decide that Mr. Smith’s investigations are not infected with a political motive.Contrast that with the investigation by John Durham, the federal prosecutor appointed by Mr. Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr in 2019 to investigate the origins of the F.B.I.’s Trump-Russia probe.Even before it began, the Durham investigation was suffused with clear political bias. Mr. Trump had repeatedly attacked the F.B.I. over its handling of the Russia probe and called for an investigation, breaching the traditional separation between the White House and the Justice Department. Mr. Barr had also spoken publicly in ways that seemed to prejudge the outcome of any investigation and inserted himself into an investigation focused on absolving Mr. Trump of wrongdoing.Not every investigation or prosecution will offer such clear-cut evidence of the presence or absence of political motivations. But as with everything relating to Mr. Trump, one generally doesn’t have to look far to find his pursuit of vengeance; he has taken to describing himself as the “retribution” of his followers. If he wins, he has promised to obliterate the Justice Department’s independence from the presidency and “go after” Mr. Biden and “the entire Biden crime family.”For the moment, at least, Mr. Trump is not the prosecutor but the prosecuted. And there should be no fear of pursuing the cases against him — especially those pertaining to his attempts to overturn his loss in 2020 — wherever they lead.“If we can’t bring those kinds of cases just because the person is politically powerful, how do we say we have a democracy?” asked Ms. Parker. “Because in that case we have people who are above the law, and they are so far above the law that they can destroy the central feature of democracy, which is elections, in which the people choose their leaders.”Source photograph by pepifoto, via Getty Images.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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      The Moment of Truth for Our Liar in Chief

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      WASHINGTON — A man is running to run the government he tried to overthrow while he was running it, even as he is running to stay ahead of the law.That sounds loony, except in the topsy-turvy world of Donald Trump, where it has a grotesque logic.The question now is: Has Trump finally run out of time, thanks to Jack Smith, who runs marathons as an Ironman triathlete? Are those ever-loving walls really closing in this time?Or is Smith Muellering it?We were expecting an epic clash when Robert Mueller was appointed in 2017 as a special counsel to head the investigation into ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia and his potential obstruction of justice. It was the flamboyant flimflam man vs. the buttoned-down, buttoned-up boy scout.Mueller, who had been a decorated Marine in Vietnam, was such a straight arrow that he never even deviated to wear a blue shirt when he ran the F.B.I.Amid the Trump administration chaos, Mueller ran a disciplined, airtight operation as special counsel, assembling a dream team of legal talent. But regarding obstruction of justice, the final report was flaccid, waffling, legalistic.Now, Mr. Smith goes to Washington. (That classic movie remembers a time when politicians got ashamed when they were caught doing wrong. How quaint.)This special counsel is another straight arrow trying to deal with a slippery switchblade: In a masterpiece of projection, Trump has been denouncing Smith as a “deranged prosecutor” and “a nasty, horrible human being.” Trump has been zigzagging his whole life and now, unbelievably, he’s trying to zigzag back into the White House, seemingly intent on burning down the federal government and exacting revenge on virtually everyone.So it will be interesting to see what the top lawyer with the severe expression makes of the bombastic dissembler. Smith seems like a no-nonsense dude who works at his desk through lunch from Subway while Trump is, of course, all nonsense, all the time.Smith has a herculean task before him. He must present a persuasive narrative that Trump and his henchmen and women (yes, you, Ginni Thomas) were determined to pull off a coup.His letter telling Trump he’s a target of the Jan. 6 investigation reportedly does not mention sedition or insurrection, which leaves people wondering exactly what Trump will be charged with.Of all the legal troubles Trump faces, this is the case that makes us breathe, “Finally,” as Susan Glasser put it in The New Yorker. It is, as she wrote, the heart of the matter.The Times reported that the letter referred to three criminal statutes: conspiracy to defraud the government; obstruction of an official proceeding; and — in a surprise move — a section of the U.S. code that makes it a crime to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Initially, the story explained, that last statute was a tool to pursue the Ku Klux Klan and others who engaged in terrorism after the Civil War; more recently it has been used to prosecute cases of voting fraud conspiracies.On an Iowa radio show on Tuesday, Trump warned it would be “very dangerous” if Smith jailed him, since his supporters have “much more passion than they had in 2020.”A May trial date has already been set in Smith’s case against Trump for retaining classified documents — despite Trump’s effort to punt it past the election. And Smith should have an ironclad case on Trump defrauding America because defrauding is what he has been doing since the cradle — lying, cheating and lining his pockets, making suckers of nearly everyone while wriggling out of trouble.Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest Republican challenger, defended Trump on Russell Brand’s podcast Friday, dismissing the idea that there was an overt effort to upend the 2020 election.“The idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true,” DeSantis said, “and it’s something that the media had spun up just to try to basically get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and political aims.”DeSantis seems almost as delusional as Trump when he denies what we saw before our eyes in the weeks after the election.Just ask the Georgia officials who were pressured by Trump to “find 11,780 votes” or the police officers who were injured on Jan. 6. Remember the fake electors in Michigan and Georgia, among other places, and the relentless pressure on Mike Pence to invalidate the election results?Trump ultimately might not be charged with staging an insurrection or sedition. And that would be a shame. For the first time, a president who lost an election nakedly attempted to hold onto power and override the votes of millions of Americans.If that isn’t sedition, it’s hard to figure what is.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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      Trump Asked About I.R.S. Inquiry of F.B.I. Officials, Ex-Aide Says Under Oath

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      In a court filing, John Kelly, who was a chief of staff under Donald Trump, said the former president had asked about having the tax agency look into Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.John F. Kelly, who served as former President Donald J. Trump’s second White House chief of staff, said in a sworn statement that Mr. Trump had discussed having the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies investigate two F.B.I. officials involved in the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.Mr. Kelly said that his recollection of Mr. Trump’s comments to him was based on notes that he had taken at the time in 2018. Mr. Kelly provided copies of his notes to lawyers for one of the F.B.I. officials, who made the sworn statement public in a court filing.“President Trump questioned whether investigations by the Internal Revenue Service or other federal agencies should be undertaken into Mr. Strzok and/or Ms. Page,” Mr. Kelly said in the statement. “I do not know of President Trump ordering such an investigation. It appeared, however, that he wanted to see Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page investigated.”Mr. Kelly’s assertions were disclosed on Thursday in a statement that was filed in connection with lawsuits brought by Peter Strzok, who was the lead agent in the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation, and Lisa Page, a former lawyer in the bureau, against the Justice Department for violating their privacy rights when the Trump administration made public text messages between them.The disclosures from Mr. Kelly, made under penalty of perjury, demonstrate the extent of Mr. Trump’s interest in harnessing the law enforcement and investigative powers of the federal government to target his perceived enemies. In the aftermath of Richard M. Nixon’s presidency, Congress made it illegal for a president to “directly or indirectly” order an I.R.S. investigation or audit.The New York Times reported last July that two of Mr. Trump’s greatest perceived enemies — James B. Comey, whom he fired as F.B.I. director, and Mr. Comey’s deputy, Andrew G. McCabe — were the subject of the same type of highly unusual and invasive I.R.S. audit.It is not known whether the I.R.S. investigated Mr. Strzok or Ms. Page. But Mr. Strzok became a subject in the investigation conducted by the special counsel John Durham into how the F.B.I. investigated Mr. Trump’s campaign. Neither Mr. Strzok nor Ms. Page was charged in connection with that investigation, which former law enforcement officials and Democrats have criticized as an effort to carry out Mr. Trump’s vendetta against the bureau. Mr. Strzok is also suing the department for wrongful termination.Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page exchanged text messages that were critical of Mr. Trump and were later made public by Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general under Mr. Trump, as he faced heavy criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill who were trying to find ways to undermine him.The sworn statements from Mr. Kelly are similar to ones he made to The New York Times in November, in which he said that Mr. Trump had told him that he wanted a number of his perceived political enemies to be investigated by the I.R.S., including Mr. Comey, Mr. McCabe, Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page.Mr. Kelly told The Times last year that Mr. Trump’s demands were part of a broader pattern of attempts to use the Justice Department and his authority as president against people who had been critical of him, including seeking to revoke the security clearances of former top intelligence officials.In the sworn statement, Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Trump had discussed having the security clearances of Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page revoked, although Mr. Kelly did not take action on the idea. Mr. Kelly said that his notes showed that Mr. Trump discussed the investigations of the two on Feb. 21, 2018.“I did not make a note of every instance in which then President Trump made a comment about Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page,” Mr. Kelly said. “President Trump generally disapproved of note-taking in meetings. He expressed concern that the notes might later be used against him.”Mr. Kelly said that he never took any steps to follow through on Mr. Trump’s desires to have his enemies investigated.Mr. Trump has said he knew nothing about the audits of Mr. Comey and Mr. McCabe and their spouses. The I.R.S.’s inspector general found last year that Mr. Comey and Mr. McCabe had been randomly selected for the audits, though the inspector general’s report acknowledged some deviations from the I.R.S.’s rigorous rules for random selection when the agency made final selections of the returns that would be audited.Mr. Kelly told The Times last year that Mr. Trump had at times discussed using the I.R.S. and the Justice Department to address others in addition to Mr. Comey, Mr. McCabe, Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page.They included, Mr. Kelly said, the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan; Hillary Clinton; and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, whose coverage often angered Mr. Trump. More

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      Special Counsel Inquiries Into Trump Cost at Least $5.4 Million

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      The Justice Department also disclosed $616,000 in spending by the special counsel scrutinizing President Biden’s handling of classified files.The investigations into former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of government files and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election cost taxpayers about $5.4 million from November through March as the special counsel, Jack Smith, moved toward charging Mr. Trump, the Justice Department disclosed on Friday.Budgeting documents also showed that Robert K. Hur, the special counsel investigating President Biden’s handling of classified documents after he left the vice presidency, spent just under $616,000 from his appointment in January through March.And John H. Durham, who was appointed special counsel during the Trump administration to investigate the Russia inquiry, reported spending a little over $1.1 million from October 2022 to the end of March, representing the first half of the 2022-2023 fiscal year. Mr. Durham’s investigation had ended, but he was writing a final report he delivered in May.The budget disclosures covered an extraordinary period in which the Justice Department had three special counsels — prosecutors who operate with a greater degree of day-to-day autonomy than ordinary U.S. attorneys — at work. With the conclusion of Mr. Durham’s investigation, two such inquiries remain.Last month, Mr. Smith, who was appointed in November, obtained a grand jury indictment against Mr. Trump and an aide, Walt Nauta. The former president faces 31 counts of unauthorized retention of secret national-security documents and six other counts involving accusations of obstructing the investigation and causing one of his lawyers to lie to the government.Mr. Smith has also continued to investigate Mr. Trump and several of his associates over the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters. Both investigations have involved significant litigation over Mr. Trump’s attempts to block grand-jury testimony by various witnesses under attorney-client privilege.The largest line item of spending by Mr. Smith through the end of March — $2,672,783 — covered personnel compensation and expenses, according to the statement of expenditures. Most of that salary money was to reimburse the Justice Department for employees who already worked for the government and had been detailed to the special counsel’s office.Mr. Smith’s operation also paid $1,881,926 for contractual services, including litigation and investigative support and purchasing transcripts.Mr. Hur’s investigation has been much quieter. Mr. Garland appointed him in January after several classified documents were found at a former office of Mr. Biden’s in Washington and at his home in Wilmington, Del. Mr. Biden and his lawyers, who alerted the government to the discoveries and have portrayed their retention as inadvertent, have said they are cooperating with the investigation.The largest line item in Mr. Hur’s office during the two and a half months covered by the budgeting document was also personnel compensation and benefits, at $346,139. That figure indicates that his operation is significantly smaller than Mr. Smith’s, reflecting the narrower scope of his assignment.Of the three special counsels, only Mr. Durham’s office was operating for the entire six-month period covered by the budgeting documents. His largest expenditure — $544,044 — also covered employee salaries and benefits.To date, Mr. Durham has reported spending about $7.7 million in taxpayer funds since Attorney General William P. Barr gave him special counsel status in October 2020, entrenching him to continue his investigation after Mr. Trump lost the election.Mr. Durham, however, began his assignment in the spring of 2019, and the Justice Department has not disclosed what taxpayers spent on about the first 16 months of his work. That period included trips to Europe as Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham fruitlessly pursued a pro-Trump conspiracy theory that the Russia inquiry had originated in a plot by Western spy agencies.Mr. Durham also later developed two narrow cases accusing nongovernment officials of making false statements, both of which ended in acquittals. 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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      House Kills Effort to Censure Adam Schiff, Aided by Some Republicans

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      The NewsThe House turned back a Republican effort on Wednesday to formally censure Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, for his role in investigating and impeaching former President Donald J. Trump.The vote was 225 to 196 to table, or kill, a resolution by Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican who has allied herself closely with the former president. Twenty Republicans joined Democrats in voting to sideline it, with another two G.O.P. lawmakers voting “present” to avoid registering a position. In a surprise, five Democrats also voted “present.”The measure would have rebuked Mr. Schiff, who as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee investigated whether Mr. Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election and prosecuted Mr. Trump at his first impeachment trial. It called for an ethics investigation into Mr. Schiff and a $16 million fine if he was found to have lied.Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, investigated whether former President Donald J. Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election and prosecuted Mr. Trump at his first impeachment trial.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesWhy It MattersThe censure resolution, coming a day after Mr. Trump was arraigned in a federal court on 37 criminal counts related to his mishandling of classified documents and efforts to obstruct federal investigators, was the latest bid by Republicans to retaliate against Democrats for their treatment of the former president.But while the measure, which accused Mr. Schiff of willfully lying for political gain, was highly partisan, it raised complicated questions about accountability and revenge. Mr. Schiff’s claims that there was “ample evidence” that Mr. Trump colluded with Russia were undermined by the conclusions of the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who wrote in his report that his investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Republicans have wielded that determination to accuse Mr. Schiff of lying.“Ultimately, this is an accountability tool that we can do to each other to ensure that the integrity of the institution is intact,” Ms. Luna said.Still, Mr. Schiff’s statements and allegations were made during an official investigation of Mr. Trump. On Wednesday, Mr. Schiff called the effort to censure him “political payback” and warned that it would set “a dangerous precedent of going after someone who held a corrupt president accountable.”The bipartisan vote to table the measure suggested that at least some Republicans agreed that it was inappropriate.BackgroundMr. Schiff, who is running in a competitive primary for the chance to succeed a fellow California Democrat, Senator Dianne Feinstein, has long been vilified by the G.O.P. Earlier this year, Speaker Kevin McCarthy unilaterally removed him from the Intelligence Committee.Ms. Luna, who first filed a resolution to fine and censure Mr. Schiff, rewrote her measure to say that the House Ethics Committee should impose the $16 million penalty if it determined that Mr. Schiff had “lied, made misrepresentations and abused sensitive information.” The move was geared toward allaying concerns about the resolution among Republicans, but it did not appear to have succeeded.“The Constitution says the House may make its own rules but we can’t violate other (later) provisions of the Constitution,” Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, wrote on Twitter, arguing that the resolution violated amendments governing excessive fines and changes to congressional pay.What’s NextMr. Schiff has been using the censure resolution to raise funds for his Senate campaign, beseeching supporters to chip in money to help him cover a fine that has little chance of being levied.It was unclear whether Ms. Luna’s effort was the start of a trend. This month, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, filed a resolution to censure Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, accusing him of improperly sharing records with the Biden administration while running the committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and the events leading up to it. More

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

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

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      Durham Report Finds Fault With FBI Over Trump-Russia Investigation

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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