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    Here’s the Status of the Four Criminal Investigations Into Donald Trump

    The revelations from grand jury proceedings in Georgia are the latest signs that federal and local inquiries into the former president could reach key decision points in coming months.When the forewoman of a Georgia grand jury investigating allegations of election interference by former President Donald J. Trump and his advisers gave a series of highly public — and highly unusual — interviews this week, she suggested that the case might soon be headed toward indictment.Three other criminal inquiries involving Mr. Trump have also been progressing relatively quickly — if not quite as fast — in recent months, with the Justice Department pressing forward in Washington and a local prosecutor moving ahead in New York.No former president has ever confronted the barrage of legal threats that Mr. Trump now faces, all of which appear to be heading toward decision points by the authorities in coming months. Heightening the stakes, the inquiries have intensified just as Mr. Trump has started ramping up his third campaign for the White House.Beyond the Georgia case, Mr. Trump is under investigation by a special counsel in Washington for his role in seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election and for his potential mishandling of classified documents. At the same time, local authorities in New York are looking into whether Mr. Trump authorized and was involved in falsely accounting for hush money payments to a pornographic film actress who said she had an affair with him.Even though much about the inquiries seems straightforward — “It’s not rocket science,” the forewoman in Georgia, Emily Kohrs, told The New York Times — each of the cases is layered with its own array of legal complexities that make predicting an outcome difficult. And that is to say nothing about the potential complications of bringing charges in the midst of a presidential campaign against a pugnacious figure like Mr. Trump, who has long assailed attempts by the authorities to hold him accountable as hoaxes and politically motivated witch hunts.Here is a look at the status of each of the criminal investigations confronting Mr. Trump.In Georgia, the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, is looking at a variety of possible charges related to Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss in the state.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesGeorgia: Election InterferenceThe Georgia investigation presents two areas of exposure for Mr. Trump.One is his direct involvement in recruiting a slate of alternate presidential electors, even after Georgia’s results were recertified by the state’s Republican leadership. “We definitely talked about the alternate electors a fair amount,” Ms. Kohrs said. The other centers on phone calls Mr. Trump made to pressure state officials after the election, including one in which he told Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, that he needed to “find” 11,780 votes — one more than Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s margin of victory in the state.The decision about whether to charge Mr. Trump will ultimately be made by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, who has been investigating the case for the last two years. Ms. Willis’s office has said it is considering everything from conspiracy and racketeering to narrower charges, such as criminal solicitation to commit election fraud.The special grand jury that Ms. Kohrs served on produced a report last month after hearing testimony since last June, but most of the report has been kept secret. In an interview this week, Ms. Kohrs said the grand jurors had recommended that several people be indicted on a range of charges, but declined to provide names before the full report was released.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.In the small portion of the report that was released, the jurors said they saw potential evidence of perjury by “one or more” witnesses. But Ms. Kohrs said the jurors appended eight pages of criminal code citations to their report, hinting at its breadth.A number of legal experts have said Mr. Trump faces significant jeopardy in the Georgia inquiry.“His risk of being charged was already substantial even before the grand jury report excerpts,” said Norman Eisen, a lawyer who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial. “The foreperson’s comments make that virtually certain.”Special Counsel: Overturning the ElectionThe Justice Department has been asking questions for more than a year about Mr. Trump’s sprawling efforts to overturn the election and whether he committed any crimes in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The investigation — one of two inherited in November by the special counsel, Jack Smith — has used a variety of methods and has gathered an enormous amount of information.Federal agents have seized cellphones and other devices from pro-Trump lawyers like John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark — as well as from one of Mr. Trump’s chief congressional allies, Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania.Prosecutors have issued grand jury subpoenas to several state Republican officials and to dozens of Trump administration lawyers and officials. Those include people like Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s onetime chief of staff, and former Vice President Mike Pence, who presumably have knowledge of the former president’s thoughts and behavior in weeks leading up to Jan. 6. In the most recent sign the investigation is continuing apace, Mr. Smith has issued subpoenas to Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner..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;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Investigators have also been poring over thousands of pages of interviews conducted by the House select committee investigating Jan. 6, which recommended that Mr. Trump be prosecuted for crimes including inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and the obstruction of a proceeding before Congress.One of the chief strands of the inquiry has focused on the plan to create false slates of pro-Trump electors in swing states actually won by Mr. Biden, mirroring one element of the Georgia investigation. Federal investigators have also been scrutinizing the broad claims by Mr. Trump and his allies that the election was marred by fraud, and a series of payments made by Save America PAC, Mr. Trump’s chief postelection fund-raising vehicle.Mr. Smith’s office has been tight-lipped about his plans, although several people familiar with the investigation have said that prosecutors could complete their work by spring or early summer. The process has often been slowed by time-consuming litigation as witnesses like Mr. Pence have sought to avoid or limit their grand jury testimony with various legal arguments.It remains unclear if Mr. Smith will ultimately indict Mr. Trump. But several legal experts — including Timothy J. Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney who led the House’s Jan. 6 investigation — have said that the key to bringing charges is obtaining clear-cut evidence that Mr. Trump intended to break the law.“When we started to see intentional conduct, specific steps that appear to be designed to disrupt the joint session of Congress, that’s where it starts to sound criminal,” Mr. Heaphy told The Times this week. “The whole key for the special counsel is intent.”Last August, the F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence, and found more than 100 classified documents, after one of his lawyers had attested that no more were there.Marco Bello/ReutersSpecial Counsel: Classified DocumentsThe investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents began in earnest last May with a subpoena. It sought the return of any classified material still in his possession, after he had voluntarily handed over an initial batch of records that turned out to include almost 200 classified documents.Within a month, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, M. Evan Corcoran, gave investigators more than 30 additional documents in response to the subpoena. Around the same time, another lawyer, Christina Bobb, asserted that a “diligent search” had been conducted at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, assuring prosecutors there were no more documents with classification markings.But the inquiry took a dramatic turn in August when acting on a search warrant, the F.B.I. descended on Mar-a-Lago and discovered more than 100 additional classified documents. The affidavit submitted by the Justice Department in seeking the search warrant said that investigators had “probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction” would be discovered.Mr. Pence and President Biden have also faced scrutiny for having classified materials in their possession — in Mr. Biden’s case, a separate special counsel investigation is underway. In the case of Mr. Trump, prosecutors have focused on a few key questions: Did Mr. Trump knowingly remove the sensitive records from the White House and did he willfully hold on to them in violation of the Espionage Act? Moreover, did he try to hinder investigators from figuring out why or where he kept them?To answer those questions, prosecutors have interviewed several junior aides to Mr. Trump and compelled grand jury testimony from more senior aides like Kash Patel.They have also sought to force Mr. Corcoran to testify fully in front of the grand jury. Mr. Corcoran tried to avoid answering questions by asserting attorney-client privilege on behalf of Mr. Trump. But the prosecutors have sought to pierce that privilege with the so-called crime-fraud exception, which can be invoked when there is evidence that legal advice or services have been used in furthering a crime.It remains unclear whether Mr. Smith will bring charges in this inquiry either. While no evidence exists at this point that Mr. Biden or Mr. Pence have sought to obstruct investigations into their own handling of documents — both brought their possession of the documents to the attention of the Justice Department — the parallel probes have complicated the political landscape and could give Mr. Trump a reason to cry foul if he is charged and the others are not.Manhattan District Attorney: Stormy DanielsThe investigation into Mr. Trump’s role in paying hush money to the porn actress Stormy Daniels has spanned five years, two Manhattan district attorneys and multiple grand juries.But recently, prosecutors under the current district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, appear to have moved closer than ever to indicting the former president. Last month, they began presenting evidence to a newly seated grand jury, which has heard from several witnesses as the office lays the groundwork for potential charges against Mr. Trump.The case would likely center on whether Mr. Trump and his company falsified business records to hide the payments to Ms. Daniels in the days before the 2016 election. But an indictment — let alone a conviction — is hardly assured.Any prosecution of the case would rely on testimony from Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, who made the payment to Ms. Daniels and who pleaded guilty himself in 2018 to federal charges. Mr. Trump reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 he paid out, and according to court papers in Mr. Cohen’s case, Mr. Trump’s company falsely identified the reimbursements as legal expenses.In New York, it is a misdemeanor to falsify business records. To make it a felony, prosecutors would need to show that Mr. Trump falsified the records to help commit or conceal a second crime — in this case, violating New York State election law, a legal theory that has not been tested. Mr. Trump has denied all wrongdoing and lashed out at the prosecutors for leading what he calls a partisan witch hunt against him. He has also denied having an affair with Ms. Daniels.Under Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney’s office had begun presenting evidence to an earlier grand jury about a far broader case focused on Mr. Trump’s business practices, including whether he fraudulently inflated the value of his assets by billions of dollars to secure favorable loans and other benefits.But in the early weeks of his tenure last year, Mr. Bragg developed concerns about the strength of that case and halted the grand jury presentation, prompting the resignations of two senior prosecutors leading the investigation.Jonah E. Bromwich More

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    Barr and Durham Made a Mockery of the Rules I Wrote

    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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    Jack Smith, Special Counsel for Trump Inquiries, Steps Up the Pace

    Named less than three months ago to oversee investigations into Donald J. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power and his handling of classified documents, the special counsel is moving aggressively.Did former President Donald J. Trump consume detailed information about foreign countries while in office? How extensively did he seek information about whether voting machines had been tampered with? Did he indicate he knew he was leaving when his term ended?Those are among the questions that Justice Department investigators have been directing at witnesses as the special counsel, Jack Smith, takes control of the federal investigations into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss and his handling of classified documents found in his possession after he left office.Through witness interviews, subpoenas and other steps, Mr. Smith has been moving aggressively since being named to take over the inquiries nearly three months ago, seeking to make good on his goal of resolving as quickly as possible whether Mr. Trump, still a leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, should face charges.Last week, he issued a subpoena to former Vice President Mike Pence, a potentially vital witness to Mr. Trump’s actions and state of mind in the days before the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.His prosecutors have brought a member of Mr. Trump’s legal team, M. Evan Corcoran, before a federal grand jury investigating why Mr. Trump did not return classified information kept at his Mar-a-Lago residence and private club in Florida. Justice Department officials have interviewed at least one other Trump lawyer in connection with the documents case.Since returning to Washington from The Hague, where he had been a war crimes prosecutor, Mr. Smith has set up shop across town from the Justice Department’s headquarters, and has built out a team. His operation’s structure seems to closely resemble the organization he oversaw when he ran the Justice Department’s public integrity unit from 2010 to 2015.Three of his first hires — J.P. Cooney, Raymond Hulser and David Harbach — were trusted colleagues during Mr. Smith’s earlier stints in the department. Thomas P. Windom, a former federal prosecutor in Maryland who had been tapped in late 2021 by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s aides to oversee major elements of the Jan. 6 inquiry, remains part of the leadership team, according to several people familiar with the situation.In addition to the documents and Jan. 6 investigations, Mr. Smith appears to be pursuing an offshoot of the Jan. 6 case, examining Save America, a pro-Trump political action committee, through which Mr. Trump raised millions of dollars with his false claims of election fraud. That investigation includes looking into how and why the committee’s vendors were paid.M. Evan Corcoran has represented Donald J. Trump in the case related to his handling of classified material for many months.Alex Kent/Getty ImagesInterviews with current and former officials, lawyers and other people who have insight into Mr. Smith’s actions and thinking provide an early portrait of how he is managing investigations that are as sprawling as they are politically explosive, with much at stake for Mr. Trump and the Justice Department.Current and former officials say Mr. Smith appears to see the various strands of his investigations as being of a single piece, with interconnected elements, players and themes — even if they produce divergent outcomes.Mr. Smith has kept a low profile, making no public appearances and sticking to a long pattern of empowering subordinates rather than interposing himself directly in investigations. It is a chain-of-command style honed during stints as a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague, a federal prosecutor in Tennessee and, most of all, during his tenure running the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, which investigates elected officials.A spokesman for Mr. Smith had no comment.But various developments that have surfaced publicly in recent days show his team taking steps on multiple fronts, illustrating how he is wrestling with multiple and sometimes conflicting imperatives of conducting an exhaustive investigation on a strictly circumscribed timetable.The intensified pace of activity speaks to his goal of finishing up before the 2024 campaign gets going in earnest, probably by summer. At the same time, the sheer scale and complexity and the topics he is focused on — and the potential for the legal process to drag on, for example in a likely battle over whether any testimony by Mr. Pence would be subject to executive privilege — suggest that coming to firm conclusions within a matter of months could be a stretch.“The impulse to thoroughly investigate Trump’s possibly illegal actions and the impulse to complete the investigation as soon as possible, because of presidential election season, are at war with one another,” said Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general and current Harvard Law professor. “One impulse will likely have to yield to the other.”In looking into Mr. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power after his election loss and how they led to the Jan. 6 riot, Mr. Smith is overseeing a number of investigative strands. The subpoena to Mr. Pence indicates that he is seeking testimony that would go straight to the question of Mr. Trump’s role in trying to prevent certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the election and the steps Mr. Trump took in drawing a crowd of supporters to Washington and inciting them.His team is sifting through mountains of testimony provided by the House Jan. 6 committee, including focusing on the so-called fake electors scheme in which some of Mr. Trump’s advisers and some campaign officials assembled alternate slates of Trump electors from contested states that he had lost..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;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.More recently his team has been asking witnesses about research the Trump campaign commissioned by an outside vendor shortly after the election that was intended to come up with evidence of election fraud. The existence of that research was reported earlier by The Washington Post.The apparently related investigation into the activities of Mr. Trump’s main fund-raising arm, the Save America PAC in Florida, was emerging even before Mr. Smith arrived in Washington around Christmas from The Hague.A vast array of Trump vendors have been subpoenaed. Investigators have been posing questions related to how money was paid to other vendors, indicating that they are interested in whether some entities were used to mask who was being paid or if the payments were for genuine services rendered.In the investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified information, and whether he obstructed justice when the government sought the return of material he had taken from the White House, investigators are casting a wide net. They appear to be seeking to recreate not only what took place once Mr. Trump had departed the White House with hundreds of sensitive documents, but also how he approached classified material and presidential records long before that, according to multiple people briefed on the matter.Mr. Smith’s team is seeking interviews with a number of people who worked in the Trump White House and who had familiarity with either how he consumed classified information, or how he dealt with paper that he routinely carted with him in cardboard boxes, during much of the span of his presidency.Such interviews could help Mr. Smith establish patterns of behavior by Mr. Trump over time, such as how he handled secret information he was provided about foreign countries and how he treated presidential documents generally.Alina Habba is another of Mr. Trump’s lawyers.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesMr. Trump was known to rip up pieces of paper, and to bring documents up to the White House residence. Notes taken by aides in 2018 show that Mr. Trump’s advisers appeared to be contending with tracking documents he had brought with him to his club in Bedminster, N.J., where he stayed over weekends during the warmer months of the year.In some cases, Mr. Trump tore up documents and threw them in toilets in the White House. Aides would periodically retrieve what was not flushed down and let it dry, then tape it back together and pass the documents on to the staff secretary, whose office managed presidential paper flow, according to two people familiar with what took place.In the documents investigation, Mr. Smith has the challenge of interviewing several unreliable narrators who may have an interest in protecting Mr. Trump.Several of Mr. Trump’s advisers have been interviewed by the Justice Department. Some have gone before the grand jury, including Mr. Corcoran, who has represented Mr. Trump in the case related to his handling of classified material for many months and had a central role in dealing with the government’s efforts to retrieve the documents, according to two people briefed on his appearance.Another aide to Mr. Trump, Christina Bobb, served as the custodian of the records the Justice Department was interested in. She signed an attestation in June claiming that a “diligent search” had been conducted of Mar-a-Lago in response to a grand jury subpoena. She asserted that the remaining documents turned over in June were all that remained.Ms. Bobb has appeared twice before the Justice Department and has told people that Mr. Corcoran drafted the statement she signed; The Wall Street Journal reported that one visit was before the grand jury. She has also said she was connected with Mr. Corcoran by Boris Epshteyn, another Trump lawyer and adviser who brought Mr. Corcoran into Mr. Trump’s circle and, empowered by Mr. Trump, for months played a lead role coordinating lawyers in some of the investigations.The Justice Department contacted another of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Alina Habba, late last year about an appearance. Ms. Habba does not represent Mr. Trump in the documents case, but she spoke about it on television. She also signed an affidavit in another case saying she had searched Mr. Trump’s office and residence in May, meaning investigators may be interested in whether she saw government documents there.The Justice Department is also seeking to question a former Trump lawyer, Alex Cannon, who people briefed on the matter said repeatedly urged Mr. Trump to turn over the boxes of material that the National Archives was seeking.Mr. Trump’s disclosure of newly located documents has been ongoing. Lawyers for the former president notified prosecutors recently about a potential witness they might want to speak with: a relatively junior former staff member to Mr. Trump who had uploaded classified material onto a laptop and discovered it only after the fact, according to a different person familiar with the incident.The discovery occurred when the staff member was placing a large trove of Mr. Trump’s daily White House schedules on the computer and realized that a small amount of classified material had been included in the schedules, the person said.In an interview with CNN on Sunday, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Tim Parlatore, said the Justice Department had issued a subpoena for a manila folder marked “classified evening summary” after Mr. Trump’s aides provided the department with reports on materials they had found after their own searches. He said it was not actually a classified marking, contained nothing and was being used by Mr. Trump to dim a blue light on his bedside phone at Mar-a-Lago that “keeps him up at night.”“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Chuck Rosenberg, a former federal prosecutor and former F.B.I. official, said of the cascade of Trump aides and lawyers becoming drawn into investigations. “It’s just a whirling dust cloud, and everyone who gets near it gets covered in grime.”While Mr. Smith did not ask Mr. Garland’s permission to subpoena Mr. Pence, one of the most extraordinary developments of his short time as special counsel, he almost certainly consulted him about it: Under the regulations, special counsels are expected to report major developments to the attorney general.The Justice Department is also seeking to question Alex Cannon, a former Trump lawyer.Pool photo by Andrew HarnikBut many legal observers see the current situation — with two likely 2024 presidential rivals, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, facing separate special counsel investigations — as evidence that the special counsel mechanism is being used far beyond its intended, limited purpose.“The special counsel regulations were an effort to give the attorney general some independence in a conflict-of-interest situation,” Mr. Goldsmith added, “but it was never intended to carry the burdens that are being imposed on it now. It is a problem, these political investigations, that our constitutional system is not equipped to handle.”Ben Protess More

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

    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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    The Durham Fiasco Is a Warning of What’s to Come

    Thank goodness Speaker Kevin McCarthy has created a House subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government!Last week, The New York Times reported on an outrageous example of such weaponization, the flagrant use of federal law enforcement powers to target an administration’s political enemies. I’m talking, of course, about the John Durham special counsel investigation, which was meant to root out the ostensibly corrupt origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, and quickly came to embody the sins that Donald Trump and his allies projected onto the F.B.I.Trump’s circle insisted, falsely, that the Mueller inquiry was a hit job that employed Russian disinformation — via the Steele dossier — to frame Trump, all part of a plot cooked up by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Durham seems to have bought into this Trumpist conspiracy theory, and to help prove it, he tried to employ what appears to be Russian disinformation to go after the Clinton camp. More specifically, he used dubious Russian intelligence memos, which analysts believed were seeded with falsehoods, to try to convince a court to give him access to the emails of a former aide to George Soros, which he believed would show Clinton-related wrongdoing.Astonishingly, The Times found that while Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr and Durham were in Europe looking for evidence to discredit the Russia investigation, Italian officials gave them a “potentially explosive tip” linking Trump to “certain suspected financial crimes.” Rather than assign a new prosecutor to look into those suspected crimes, Barr folded the matter into Durham’s inquiry, giving Durham criminal prosecution powers for the first time.Then the attorney general sat back while the media inferred that the criminal investigation must mean Durham had found evidence of malfeasance connected to Russiagate. Barr, usually shameless in his public spinning of the news, quietly let an investigation into Trump be used to cast aspersions on Trump’s perceived enemies. (The fate of that inquiry remains a mystery.)This squalid episode is a note-perfect example of how Republican scandal-mongering operates. The right ascribes to its adversaries, whether in the Democratic Party or the putative deep state, monstrous corruption and elaborate conspiracies. Then, in the name of fighting back, it mimics the tactics it has accused its foes of using.Look, for example, at the behavior that gave rise to Trump’s first impeachment. Trump falsely claimed that Joe Biden, as vice president, used the threat of withholding American loan guarantees to blackmail the Ukrainian government into doing his personal bidding. Hoping to get Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to substantiate his lies, Trump tried to use the threat of withholding American aid to … blackmail the Ukrainian government into doing his personal bidding. The symmetry between accusations and counter-accusations, in turn, fosters a widespread cynicism about ever finding the truth.It’s important to keep this in mind because we’re about to see a lot more of it. Now that they control the House, Republicans have prioritized investigating their political opponents. McCarthy has stacked the Oversight Committee, central to the House’s investigative apparatus, with flame-throwing fantasists, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert. Further, as Politico reported in a “field guide” to the coming Republican inquiries, McCarthy has urged Republicans to treat every committee like the Oversight Committee, meaning all investigations, all the time.There are going to be investigations into Hunter Biden, and investigations into the origins of the pandemic. There will likely be scrutiny of the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago and Biden’s handling of classified documents. And, as my colleague David Firestone on the editorial board put it over the weekend, “Republicans in the House are launching a new snipe hunt” for proof that the F.B.I. and other intelligence agencies were “weaponized” against conservatives.These all promise to be congressional equivalents of the Durham inquiry. Certainly, most if not all congressional investigations are politically motivated, but there is nevertheless a difference between inquiries predicated on something real, and those, like the many investigations in the Benghazi attack, meant to troll for dirt and reify Fox News phantasms. House Democrats examined Trump’s interference with the C.D.C. during the acute stage of the pandemic. House Republicans plan to look into what the Republican congressman Jim Banks termed the military’s “dangerous” Covid vaccine mandates. There might be an equivalence in the form of these two undertakings, but not in their empirical basis.It remains to be seen whether our political media is up for the task of making these distinctions. The coverage of Trump and Biden’s respective retention of classified documents offers little cause for optimism. Again and again, journalists and pundits have noted that, while the two cases are very different, there are seeming similarities, and those similarities are good for Trump. This is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, since by speculating about political narratives, you help create them.“John Durham has already won,” said the headline of a Politico article from last year, noting his success in perpetuating the right’s fevered counter-history of Russiagate. Of course he didn’t win; he would go on to lose both cases arising from his investigation as well as the honorable reputation he had before he started it. What he did manage to do, however, was spread a lot of confusion and waste a lot of time. Now the Republican House picks up where he left off.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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    Bill Barr’s Image Rehab Is Kaput

    Former Attorney General William Barr has spent the last year in a desperate salvage operation for what’s left of his legal and ethical reputation. During his 22 months in office, he allowed his Justice Department to become a personal protection racket for his boss, Donald Trump, and left prosecutors, the F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials subject to the worst impulses of the president. But then, in his 2022 memoir, Mr. Barr did an about-face, bashing Mr. Trump for lacking a presidential temperament and singling out his “self-indulgence and lack of self-control.”In the book, he urged Republicans not to renominate Mr. Trump in 2024, accusing the former president of going “off the rails” with his stolen-election claims by preferring the counsel of “sycophants” and “whack jobs” to that of his real advisers. Clearly concerned that history was paying attention, he was even stronger in his videotaped testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, loosing a variety of barnyard epithets and bitter insults to describe Mr. Trump’s legal strategy. He said the president had become “detached from reality” and was doing a disservice to the nation.The hollow and self-serving nature of this turnabout was always apparent. Mr. Barr never made these concerns public at a time when his dissent would have made a difference. Instead, he left office in 2020 showering compliments on his boss, praising Mr. Trump’s “unprecedented achievements” and promising that Justice would continue to pursue claims of voter fraud that he must have known were baseless.But if Mr. Barr harbored any fantasy that he might yet be credited with a wisp of personal integrity for standing up for democracy, that hope was thoroughly demolished on Thursday when The Times published the details of what really happened when Mr. Barr launched a counter-investigation into the origins of Robert Mueller’s report on the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The reporting demonstrated a staggering abuse of the special counsel system and the attorney general’s office, all in a failed attempt by Mr. Barr to rewrite the sour truths of Mr. Trump’s history.It was bad enough when, in March 2019, Mr. Barr tried to mislead the public into thinking the forthcoming Mueller report exonerated Mr. Trump, when in fact the report later showed just how strong the links were between the campaign and the Russian government, which worked to help defeat Hillary Clinton. A few months later Mr. Barr assigned John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, as a special counsel to investigate Mr. Mueller’s investigation, hoping to prove Mr. Trump’s wild public allegations that the federal intelligence officials had helped instigate the claims of Russian interference to damage him.Attorneys general are not supposed to interfere in a special counsel’s investigation. The whole point of the system is to isolate the prosecution of sensitive cases from the appearance of political meddling. But the new Times reporting shows that Mr. Barr did the opposite, regularly meeting with Mr. Durham to discuss his progress and advocating on his behalf with intelligence officials when they were unable to come up with the nonexistent proof Mr. Barr wanted to see. (Aides told Times reporters that Mr. Barr was certain from the beginning that U.S. spy agencies were behind the allegations of collusion.)When the Justice Department’s own inspector general prepared to issue a report saying that, while the F.B.I. made some ethical mistakes, the investigation was legitimate and not politically motivated, Mr. Durham lobbied him to drop the finding. When that effort was unsuccessful, Mr. Barr reverted to his usual pattern of trying to spin the report before it was issued, disagreeing with its finding before it was even out. Mr. Durham then followed up with a similar statement, shattering the clear department principle of staying silent about a current investigation.The two men even traveled to Britain and Italy together, pressuring government agencies there to disclose what they told U.S. spy agencies about the Trump-Russia connections. That infuriated officials of those governments, who said they had done nothing of the kind, and no evidence was ever found that they had. But on one of those trips, The Times reported, Italian officials gave the men a tip which, people familiar with the matter said, linked Mr. Trump to possible serious financial crimes. (It is not clear what those crimes were, and more reporting will be necessary to reveal the details.) Did Mr. Barr follow protocol and turn the tip over to regular prosecutors in his department for investigation? No. Instead, he gave it to his traveling companion, Mr. Durham, who opened a criminal investigation but never made it public and never filed charges, and when word began to trickle out that a suspected crime had been discovered, he falsely let the world think it had something to do with his original goal.The Durham investigation, of course, has never presented any evidence that the F.B.I. or intelligence agencies committed any misconduct in the course of the Russia investigation, bitterly disappointing Mr. Barr and especially his patron, Mr. Trump, who had assured his supporters for months that it would produce something big. Desperate for some kind of success, Mr. Durham indicted Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who had worked for Democrats in their dealings with the F.B.I., over the objections of two prosecutors on the special counsel team who said the case was far too thin and who later left the staff.Mr. Sussmann was acquitted last May of lying to the bureau, and the jury forewoman told reporters that bringing the case had been unwise. Mr. Barr later tried to justify the trial by saying it served another purpose in exposing the Clinton campaign’s starting the Russia narrative as a “dirty trick.” The trial did nothing of the kind, but it did expose Mr. Barr’s willingness to abuse the gratuitous prosecution of an individual to score political points against one of Mr. Trump’s most prominent enemies.One of the other casualties of this deceitful crusade was the deliberate damage it did to the reputations of the F.B.I., the intelligence agencies and officials in Mr. Barr’s own department. All of these agencies have had many problematic episodes in their pasts, but there is no evidence in this case that they willfully tried to smear Mr. Trump and his campaign with false allegations of collusion. They were trying to do their jobs, on which the nation’s security depends, but because they got in Mr. Trump’s way, Mr. Barr aided in degrading their image through a deep-state conspiracy theory before an entire generation of Trump supporters. Republicans in the House are launching a new snipe hunt for proof that these same government offices were “weaponized” against conservatives, an expedition that is likely to be no more effective than Mr. Durham’s and Mr. Barr’s.But weakening the country’s institutions and safeguards for political benefit is how Mr. Barr did business in the nearly two years he served as the nation’s top law enforcement official under Mr. Trump. He has a long history of making the Justice Department an instrument of his ideology and politics; when he was attorney general in 1992 during the Bush administration, the Times columnist William Safire accused him of leading a “Criminal Cover-up Division” in refusing to appoint an independent counsel to investigate whether the Bush administration had knowingly provided aid to Saddam Hussein that was used to finance the military before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Under Mr. Trump, Mr. Barr did the opposite, demanding that an unnecessary special counsel do the bidding of the White House and trying to steer the investigation to Mr. Trump’s advantage. His efforts came to naught, and so will his campaign to be remembered as a defender of the Constitution.David Firestone is a member of the editorial board. Mr. Firestone was a reporter and editor at The Times from 1993 to 2014, including serving as a congressional correspondent and New York City Hall bureau chief, and was executive editor for digital at NBC News until 2022.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

    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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    Biden’s Classified Documents Scandal Is Really Bad for 2024

    Remember the iconic image of a smiling Joe Biden in his 1967 Corvette Stingray? It conjured charming Uncle Joe, a retro-cool guy who’d been around the track and knew how to handle it.Four months after President Biden called Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents “irresponsible,” that vintage car — parked at the president’s home in Delaware next to his own boxes containing classified material — has been transformed into a shiny symbol of hypocrisy. If you went into a G.O.P. whataboutism lab and asked for a perfect gaffe, you’d come out with the president snapping last week to a Fox News reporter, “My Corvette is in a locked garage.”Well, the storage room at Mar-a-Lago is locked, too.Just two weeks ago, Democrats were chortling over chaos in the G.O.P., convinced that far-right Republican control of the House would help them in 2024. Then they experienced the exquisite torture that comes with the slow release of politically damaging information, in this case the acknowledgment of classified documents found in Mr. Biden’s former offices and Wilmington home. Now he’s fully in the barrel — targeted by powerful congressional committees, aggressive reporters looking for scoops and a methodical new special counsel, Robert Hur, to match Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Mr. Trump.The optical equivalence between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden is phony, of course. Mr. Trump is a grifter who appears to have intentionally taken hundreds of classified documents, bragging that he kept the folders marked “classified” or “confidential” as “‘cool’ keepsakes.” He said of his stash of classified documents, according to several advisers, “It’s not theirs; it’s mine,” and seemingly defied a subpoena to return the documents, thereby exposing him to possible prosecution for obstruction of justice. Mr. Biden, by contrast, was sloppy and slow to search for and disclose the existence of about 20 stray classified documents but is fully cooperating with authorities.Unfortunately for Mr. Biden, this distinction cannot easily survive the miasma of congressional and special counsel subpoenas, relentless questions from reporters and fresh allegations of impropriety that signal the arrival of a new episodic political drama. Many voters with better things to do with their time than parse the nuances of presidential record keeping may casually conclude that both men are careless, lying politicians.On one level, the classified documents imbroglio is just an acrimonious prelude to the 2024 campaign, a story that will surface, disappear, then surface again with tiresome predictability. But Mr. Biden’s new problems run deeper than that. They represent both a challenge to his core political brand of honor and decency and the start of a more intense, potentially combative period of scrutiny for a president poised to seek re-election. All of which suggests that we may look back on January of 2023 as the end of a relatively brief era in American political life — a period, for all its turmoil, when two Democratic presidents avoided being enmeshed in the grinding machinery of scandal that has otherwise characterized Washington for half a century.All 10 American presidencies since 1973 have faced investigation by a special counsel or independent prosecutor, except one: Barack Obama’s. For eight years, Mr. Obama and his vice president and other high-ranking officials were seen as figures of unusual rectitude, and the impression of integrity returned when Mr. Biden took office after four years of wall-to-wall corruption. But now this sharp ethical contrast with Mr. Trump has been dulled. That complicates the president’s expected re-election campaign — and could even short-circuit it.Most Democrats still think Mr. Biden is honest, and they view his accomplishments on the economy, climate, infrastructure and defending democracy as far more significant than this lapse. But it’s hard to exaggerate the level of Democratic exasperation with him for squandering a huge political advantage on the Mar-a-Lago story and for muddying what may have been the best chance to convict Mr. Trump on federal charges. Mr. Biden’s more serious problem may be with independents, whom he carried by nine points in 2020. Unforced errors can take a toll with them. Even as the classified documents story eventually fades — it will most likely not be a first-tier issue next year — swing voters may see him in a harsher light.To understand why, it’s necessary to look back more than a dozen years. From the first moments of Mr. Obama’s presidency, Republicans attacked him for everything from having been born in Kenya (a racist lie pushed by Mr. Trump, among others) to wearing tan suits. Even when it distracted Mr. Obama, he brushed it all off his shoulders.That’s because the Obama-Biden administration set an exceptionally high ethical standard and usually met it. Mr. Obama’s scandal-less White House liked to keep things “tight,” as he put it — sometimes too tight. If any appointee stepped out of line, the response was often to fire first and ask questions later, as Shirley Sherrod, a Black official at the Agriculture Department, learned in 2010 after Fox News aired a highly edited tape taken from a right-wing website that made it seem she had delivered a racist speech to the N.A.A.C.P. Ms. Sherrod’s remarks were in fact taken badly out of context, but by the time this was recognized, she had already been dismissed. (The agency subsequently offered to rehire her.)Essentially all Obama-era “scandals” collapsed under scrutiny or never touched his White House. Oceans of ink were spilled chronicling the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar panel company that received loan guarantees from the Energy Department. But no improper conduct was ever established, and the overall loan guarantee program actually turned a profit for the government. Likewise, a poorly planned and ill-fated sting at the U.S.-Mexico border called Operation Fast and Furious brought inconclusive congressional hearings and a contempt citation for Attorney General Eric Holder but did not tarnish Mr. Obama.Mr. Biden’s vulnerabilities are closer to home. His allies are reportedly claiming the story will blow over because it’s just D.C. noise, but that was not Hillary Clinton’s experience with her emails and server. In the same way that the grueling Benghazi hearings from 2014 through 2016 softened Mrs. Clinton up for later attacks, the Biden documents story may give new life to unproven allegations about his connections to unsavory Chinese executives in business with members of his family. Did foreign nationals have access to the mishandled classified documents? That’s highly unlikely. But Republican lawmakers will use Democratic charges about security breaches at Mar-a-Lago as an excuse to open outlandish lines of inquiry.And the G.O.P. now has subpoena power to delve into red-meat targets like the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and any communications on it that involved the current president. James Comer, the new chair of the House Oversight Committee, will almost certainly haul Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden, the president’s brother, before the committee to testify about their suspiciously lucrative deals with foreign firms and the way their business intersected disastrously with Hunter Biden’s squalid personal life.To navigate the coming storm, Joe Biden needs to up his political game — no small feat for a man of his age — and avoid becoming his own worst enemy. First, he will have to keep his famous temper out of public view. If Uncle Joe morphs into Testy Joe, over his son or his handling of classified documents or anything else, his problems will worsen. Beyond an improving economy and a successful conclusion to the war in Ukraine, the best medicine for his political ailments would be a surprising legislative victory. In the new Congress, 18 House Republicans represent districts that Mr. Biden carried in 2020. If Mr. Biden can persuade just a handful of them to vote against defaulting on the national debt and sending the global economy into a depression — a harder task than it sounds because of all-but-inevitable right-wing primary challenges — he’ll get credit for averting a major economic crisis.But even if Mr. Biden puts wins on the board, survives venomous Republican lawmakers and gets off with a slap on the wrist in the special counsel’s report, the classified documents story has likely stripped him of a precious political asset with some independents and Democrats: the benefit of the doubt. The general feeling that Mr. Biden — like Mr. Obama — is clean and scandal-free has been replaced by the normal Washington assumption of some level of guilt.Republicans are ferocious attack dogs, especially when they have something to chew on. And Mr. Biden, a better president than candidate, has never had the nimbleness necessary for good defense. When he first ran for president in 1988, he was forced to withdraw amid minor charges of plagiarism that a more dexterous politician might have survived. Over the years, his skills on the stump deteriorated. He performed poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2020 and recovered in South Carolina and won the nomination only because Democrats concluded en masse that he was the best candidate to beat Mr. Trump.That remains the prevailing assumption inside the Democratic Party: He did it before and can do it again. But it’s not clear that rank-and-file voters agree. Last year a New York Times/Siena College poll showed nearly two-thirds of Democrats didn’t want Mr. Biden to run. While his standing improved after the midterms, he’s down in the first polls released since the documents story broke.The president is now an elderly swimmer in a sea of sharks. And some of them may even be Democrats. It’s not hard to envision an ambitious primary challenger arguing, more in sorrow than in anger, that he or she supports most of the Biden record but elections are about the future and the party needs a more vigorous candidate. (Mr. Biden would be 86 at the end of a second term.) Democratic leaders will be shocked and appalled by the upstart’s temerity in spoiling the party’s impressive unity. But New Hampshire is full of anti-establishment independents, and basically the entire state is furious with Mr. Biden for proposing to bump its primary to the second week of the schedule. He could easily lose or be weakened there, opening the door for other Democrats. Which ones? That’s what primaries are for.In the meantime, the president isn’t looking good in polls pitting him against Republicans in hypothetical 2024 matchups. Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump have been running about even, a depressing finding for Democrats. And if the G.O.P. nominates a younger candidate like Ron DeSantis, Mr. Biden could be the octogenarian underdog in the general election.Imagine instead that the president takes a leaf from Nancy Pelosi and decides not to run. Mr. Comer and the clownish members of his committee would probably end up training most of their fire on Democrats not named Biden. Democrats would “turn the page,” as Mr. Obama recommended in 2008, to a crop of fresher candidates, probably governors, who contrast better with Mr. Trump and would have good odds of beating a younger Republican. And the smiling old gentleman in the Corvette — his shortcomings forgotten and his family protected — would assume his proper place as a bridge between political generations and arguably the most accomplished one-term president in American history.Jonathan Alter, a longtime political journalist, writes the newsletter Old Goats and has written books on Franklin D. Roosevelt, Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter.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