The report released by Special Counsel John Durham officially found the FBI used “uncorroborated intelligence” when it launched its investigation into Trump ahead of the 2016 election. The report also determined that Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents failed to maintain “strict fidelity to the law” throughout its investigation. On Monday, the FBI admitted to the findings.
In a statement, the bureau wrote:
“The conduct in 2016 and 2017 that Special Counsel Durham examined was the reason that current FBI leadership already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time. Had those reforms been in place in 2016, the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented…This report reinforces the importance of ensuring the FBI continues to do its work with the rigor, objectivity, and professionalism the American people deserve and rightly expect.”
Durham’s report also found that “neither U.S. nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement” of the investigation. “Our investigation determined that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting,” the report found.
Even CNN host Jake Tapper admitted the occurrences are “devasting to the FBI.” Tapper stated, “The report is now here, it has dropped. And it might have not produced everything of what some Republicans hoped for, it is, regardless, devastating to the FBI, and to a degree, it does exonerate Donald Trump.”
CNN’s Evan Perez then added that the “FBI moved very quickly to investigate these allegations of connections of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that they did so by ignoring a lot of evidence that would have led them to drop that altogether.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation reminds readers, “Durham was appointed by then-Attorney General Bill Barr in 2020 to investigate the investigation of Crossfire Hurricane. Crossfire Hurricane later determined there was no evidence of criminal conspiracy between any Trump campaign officials and operatives of the Russian government.”