(LibertySons.org) – Former Attorney General Bill Barr appointed John Durham to investigate the origins of the Crossfire Hurricane FBI investigation into former President Donald Trump beginning in 2019 and appointed him as special counsel in late 2020. On Monday, May 15, Durham released a 300-plus page final report detailing his findings, which strongly criticized the FBI for bias. He cited the agency’s failure to investigate the information obtained from Russian intelligence analysis that potentially implicated the Clinton campaign even after then-President Barrack Obama received a secret briefing from CIA Director John Brennan regarding the matter.
The information, gleaned from the analysis of clandestinely-obtained Russian intelligence, alleged Hillary Clinton approved a July 26, 2016, proposal submitted by one of her foreign policy advisers to smear her political opponent, Donald Trump. The information claimed that her campaign would create a scandal to blame Russia for hacking the Democratic National Convention (DNC) and tie Trump to Putin and Russia. Durham referred to the Russian-based intelligence claim as the “Clinton Plan intelligence” throughout his report, devoting more than 26 pages of his analysis to the information and mentioning it at least 64 times.
.@POTUS was briefed in 2016 about an alleged plan by @HillaryClinton to tie Donald Trump to Russia to distract from her own use of an illicit private email server while secretary of state, according to special counsel John Durham.https://t.co/YPKoJxufy5
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) May 17, 2023
Brennan, who briefed Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director James Comey, specifically noted that the intelligence community couldn’t know the accuracy of the allegation or whether Russian intelligence sources had exaggerated or fabricated the information. Still, intelligence officials forwarded a referral for an investigation to the FBI on September 7, 2016.
Yet, Durham reported the FBI never moved forward on any investigation into the Clinton Plan intelligence. By contrast, the FBI investigated the Trump campaign based on “raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated intelligence” obtained from the Steele Dossier. Durham concluded the FBI’s failure to investigate Clinton stemmed from bias but didn’t constitute provable criminal wrongdoing. Durham suggested the bias was rooted in the fact that the Clinton Plan intelligence was information gleaned from a hostile adversary as opposed to the Steele Dossier.
Moreover, Durham claimed the handling of the Clinton Plan intelligence represented a “significant intelligence failure.” He suggested the FBI might avoid future similar failures by including an internal non-partisan official who would be responsible for challenging investigative steps to help the bureau vet information more thoroughly before acting upon it.
~Here’s to Our Liberty!
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