Special Counsel John Durham’s report on the FBI’s investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign criticized the agency for acting on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence.”
Yet while much of the content had already come to light in a December 2019 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general that spurred changes within the FBI, CNN anchor Jake Tapper claimed Monday that the report by Durham is “devastating” to the organization and even exonerates Trump “to a degree.”
Yet not all were so convinced. On The Lead, Tapper discussed the report with CNN Senior Justice Correspondent Evan Perez, who reiterated what Tapper had noted earlier: that it recommended no criminal charges beyond those that were already brought. (The only conviction from Durham’s investigation was of a former FBI lawyer for altering an email to help obtain surveillance of a Trump adviser.)
“The stunning thing about this report is that we frankly knew a lot of this,” Perez said, noting how the 2019 report “told us a lot of these findings that Durham is now confirming, frankly.”
“One of the reasons why Durham was brought on board was supposedly to go beyond what the inspector general of the Justice Department found in their investigation,” continued Perez. Durham was appointed by Bill Barr, then-President Trump’s attorney general, about a month after Special Counsel Robert Mueller released his report on Trump’s role in Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“One of the things they were supposed to do was to tell us a lot about what the intelligence community was doing,” Perez said. “It turns out they didn’t find very much there in the intelligence community, and certainly not to support the suspicions that they had that there was a cabal of people from the FBI and the intelligence community who were out to get Donald Trump. That appears to have fallen flat as part of this investigation.”
Tapper did not go into detail surrounding why he considered the Durham report to be “devastating,” however, at one point, he paraphrased part of it, saying that Durham “is basically saying these are not criminal allegations, but he’s saying these were unprofessional and failed to meet the standards of the Justice Department and the FBI.”
Tapper added later: “It is possible that the FBI had legitimate cause for concern and it is also possible that some individuals in the FBI got ahead over their skis and were not as professional as they should have been.”
After speaking with Perez, , Tapper then turned to CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig, who had a similar reaction to how Durham’s report said that the FBI shouldn’t have launched the Trump-Russia probe.
“There’s no surprise in that conclusion. It was really sort of a foregone conclusion from the start,” Honig said, pointing to the circumstances of Durham’s appointment, including Trump’s demands to “investigate the investigators,” as well as the late 2019 inspector general report.
That report, Honig said, “found that the FBI made several missteps—and Durham seizes on some of these as well—however, there was ample ground to open an investigation. And right away, John Durham came out with a public statement and said, ‘I disagree with that.’”
The FBI on Monday issued a statement on Durham’s report, reiterating that it has “already implemented dozens of corrective actions.”
“Had those reforms been in place in 2016,” it added, “the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented.”
