Republicans are tearing up the press over Special Counsel John Durham’s report that found the FBI had no credible grounds to investigate ties between Trump and Russia and found no conspiracy before the 2016 election.
Members of the GOP slam leftist outlets for publishing stories despite shaky sources and are now calling on The New York Times and Washington Post to have the Pulitzer Prizes they won for ‘collusion’ stories about the Kremlin taken down .
It follows scathing conclusions in Durham’s final report published Monday night – including the deconstruction of the Steele dossier and “salacious” claims against Donald Trump.
Democrats, meanwhile, have said the investigation’s conclusion provided no new evidence and that the four-year investigation was a “slumber party.”
What have we learned from the Durham report? That the New York Times and the Washington Post have been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for writing a bunch of politically motivated nonsense,” Senate Judge Lindsey Graham said in a statement.
Senator Lindsey Graham, left, demanded the FBI “apologise” for ruining lives after the Durham report, while Chairman Dick Durbin, right, said the report offered nothing new
Staffers from The New York Times and the Washington Post are pictured together after receiving the Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage of Trump-Russia ties before the 2016 election. The stories have been dismantled by the Durham report
Graham called the FBI’s Operation Hurricane a “scathing indictment of the FBI under James Comey and the operations of the Justice Department” and said it “reads like a page out of the Nixon playbook.”
Found Durham’s report the FBI did not have enough “factual evidence” to investigate Trump-Russia conspiracy allegations.
The investigation led to a plea of guilty from a little-known FBI employee, but prosecutors lost the only two criminal cases they brought to trial.
The report, which runs to more than 300 pages, revealed the Justice Department and the FBI “did not live up to their mission of strict adherence to the law” at the time launch of the Trump-Russia probe.
The special counsel on Friday delivered the report on his four-year investigation, which has cost more than $6 million in taxpayers’ money, to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
“I would like FBI Director Wray to get on the phone and apologize to the people whose lives have been destroyed by the FBI,” Graham said on Fox News Tuesday.
Democrats largely said the report contained no new findings not already revealed in the DOJ’s 2019 inspector general’s report.
“However, unlike Inspector General Horowitz’s report, the Durham report does not offer meaningful recommendations on how the FBI can improve the application of its significant oversight authority in its investigations,” said Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin.
Donald Trump once predicted that Special Counsel Durham would discover the “crime of the century.” Instead, we got a report that has cost taxpayers more than $6.5 million in four years, only to repeat the conclusions of the 2019 IG report,” Durbin continued.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., demanded “consequences” after saying the report found “Obama’s FBI had no real evidence of collusion when they began the political witch hunt for Donald Trump.”
Meanwhile, Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary, has called Durham to testify on Capitol Hill next week about the report.
Ranking member Jerry Nadler called the report a “political repeat” of what the DOJ IG found in 2019.
‘Mr. Durham has for the last time over-promised and under-delivered. Nothing in this report changes the outcome of the Mueller investigation, which resulted in multiple convictions, found more than a hundred contacts between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government, and substantial reasons to believe that Donald Trump was guilty to obstruction of justice. added.
Special Counsel Durham handed Congress Monday the report on his four-year investigation that cost more than $6 million in taxpayers’ money
Special counsel John Durham was appointed in 2019 by then-Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate misconduct related to the Crossfire Hurricane probe
Durham writes in the report, “Based on the evidence gathered in the many extensive and costly federal investigations of these cases, including the immediate investigation, neither U.S. law enforcement nor the intelligence community appears to have had any factual evidence of conspiracy in their property at the start of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
The FBI’s opening of Crossfire Hurricane was “based on raw, unanalyzed and unconfirmed information,” Durham states.
Crossfire Hurricane was the internal code name for an FBI investigation that began in 2016 to investigate possible links between the then Trump campaign and Russia. However, it has since been revealed that the entire basis for the investigation was based on false information.
The document further elaborates on the FBI’s many missteps in the initial opening of the investigation, which was based on an unscreened file of British spy Christopher Steele.
The report contains blistering language saying that Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications opened by the FBI as part of Crossfire Hurricane were not made out of a mission of “strict adherence to the law.”
FBI personnel working on the FISA applications “displayed, at best, an arrogant attitude toward accuracy and completeness” and “ignored key requirements” on multiple occasions, Durham says.
He says the evidence is that the FBI officials “did not really believe there was probable reason to believe that the target was knowingly involved in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of a foreign power.”
The FBI responded to the report in a statement Monday, saying that “corrective actions” have now been taken that would have prevented “missteps in 2016.”
“The conduct in 2016 and 2017 that Special Counsel Durham investigated was the reason the current FBI leadership has already taken dozens of corrective actions, which have been in effect for some time now,” the FBI told DailyMail.com.
If those reforms had taken place in 2016, the missteps identified in the report could have been avoided. This report underscores the importance of ensuring that the FBI continues to do its job with the rigor, objectivity and professionalism that the American people deserve and rightly expect.”