Durham Inquiry Appears to Wind Down as Grand Jury Expires
Category: News & Politics
Via: tessylo • 2 years ago • 67 commentsBy: Katie Benner, Adam Goldman and Charlie Savage, The New York Times
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Durham Inquiry Appears to Wind Down as Grand Jury Expires
John Durham, special counsel assigned by the Trump administration to examine the origins of the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign's ties to Russia, in Washington on May 17, 2022. (Samuel Corum/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — When John Durham was assigned by the Justice Department in 2019 to examine the origins of the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, President Donald Trump and his supporters expressed a belief that the inquiry would prove that a “deep state” conspiracy including top Obama-era officials had worked to sabotage him.
Now Durham appears to be winding down his three-year inquiry without anything close to the results Trump was seeking. The grand jury that Durham has recently used to hear evidence has expired, and while he could convene another, there are currently no plans to do so, three people familiar with the matter said.
Durham and his team are working to complete a final report by the end of the year, they said, and one of the lead prosecutors on his team is leaving for a job with a prominent law firm.
After Durham’s team completes its report, it will be up to Attorney General Merrick Garland to decide whether to make its findings public. The report will be Durham’s opportunity to present any evidence or conclusions that challenge the Justice Department’s basis for opening the investigation in 2016 into the links between Trump and Russia.
The Justice Department declined to comment.
Durham and his team used a grand jury in Washington to indict Michael Sussmann, a prominent cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign. Sussman was indicted last year on a charge of making a false statement to the FBI at a meeting in which he shared a tip about potential connections between computers associated with Trump and a Kremlin-linked Russian bank.
Sussmann was acquitted of that charge at trial in May.
A grand jury based in the Eastern District of Virginia last year indicted a Russia analyst who had worked with Christopher Steele, a former British spy who was the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Trump. The dossier played no role in the FBI’s decision to begin examining the ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. It was used in an application to obtain a warrant to surveil a Trump campaign associate.
The analyst, Igor Danchenko, who is accused of lying to federal investigators, goes on trial next month in Alexandria, Virginia.
In the third case, Durham’s team negotiated a plea deal with an FBI lawyer whom an inspector general had accused of doctoring an email used in preparation for a wiretap renewal application. The plea deal resulted in no prison time.
Trump and his allies have long hoped that Durham would prosecute former FBI and intelligence officials responsible for the Russia investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane. Trump has described the investigation as a witch hunt and accused the FBI of spying on his presidential campaign.
Last month, in the days after the FBI obtained a search warrant to seize boxes of classified and other government documents he was keeping at his resort in Florida, Trump used social media to amplify the unsubstantiated idea that Durham had uncovered a vast political conspiracy by the Obama administration and the intelligence community to damage him.
At the same time, the former president seemed to acknowledge a lowering of expectations, from indictments to a report.
“The public is waiting ‘with bated breath’ for the Durham Report, which should reveal corruption at a level never seen before in our country,” Trump wrote.
In May 2019, Durham was selected by the attorney general at the time, William Barr, to review the origins of Crossfire Hurricane, an investigation that was eventually completed by Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed to oversee it. The Mueller report scrutinized numerous links between Trump campaign associates and Russia, but did not find a criminal conspiracy.
Durham’s review eventually evolved into a criminal investigation, allowing him to issue grand jury subpoenas to gather documents and interview witnesses. Shortly before the 2020 election, Barr made him a special counsel, permitting him to stay in place even after Trump left office.
Garland has met with the Durham team a handful of times, and a top official in the deputy attorney general’s office regularly checks in with Durham on the investigation’s progress.
Early this year, Justice Department leadership asked Durham to issue a report on his findings in May. That timing slipped, and now Durham is aiming to submit his report to Garland after the election, the people familiar with the matter said.
The assignment Barr gave to Durham faced difficulties from the beginning.
To begin with, the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael Horowitz, was already conducting an exhaustive review of Crossfire Hurricane.
In late 2019, Horowitz delivered a report that uncovered significant problems with the FBI’s applications for wiretap orders targeting Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser with numerous ties to Russia. But it also concluded that the investigation as a whole had a proper legal basis, and that there was no evidence that “political bias or improper motivation” had led the FBI to open it.
Durham issued an unusual public statement saying without explanation that he disagreed with the inspector general report’s conclusion that Crossfire Hurricane had been properly opened. Horowitz later told Congress that Durham had told him he thought it should have been opened as a “preliminary” investigation rather than a “full” one.
Horowitz’s investigation also discovered an FBI lawyer’s doctoring of the email used in preparation for a wiretap renewal application. He referred the matter for prosecution, and Durham’s team negotiated the resulting plea deal.
In an initial period, Durham seemed to be searching for signs of political bias among the FBI officials Horowitz had already scrutinized and hunting for wrongdoing among intelligence agencies outside Horowitz’s jurisdiction. But those efforts did not result in charges.
In 2020, a top prosecutor and longtime confidant of Durham at the U.S. attorney’s office in Connecticut abruptly quit the team.
Although the charges Durham brought against both Sussmann and Danchenko last fall were narrow, Durham used the indictments to argue that the FBI was deliberately ignoring information that cut against the idea that Trump and his associates had improperly worked with Russia.
Durham’s team argued in court that Clinton campaign associates had misled people into thinking that Trump or his campaign associates had colluded with Russia, although it did not charge such a conspiracy. Durham accused Danchenko of lying to the FBI in ways that made the Steele dossier seem more credible than it was.
Horowitz’s report, however, showed that the FBI had not opened the Russia investigation on the basis of the Steele dossier — contrary to claims by Trump’s supporters.
The coming trial of Danchenko will give Durham another opportunity to scrutinize aspects of the FBI’s Russia investigation.
Andrew DeFilippis, a prosecutor who played a key role in the Sussmann case, has notified the court that he will not take part in the trial of Danchenko. DeFilippis has told colleagues that he is leaving for a job at the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell.
Reached at his desk at the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan last week, DeFilippis declined to comment.
© 2022 The New York Times Company
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So all those years for naught?
3 years and nothing. poor fascists...
We all knew it was a big old nothingberder from the beginning.
Durham.
SO IMPOTENT!
It appears his enablers/supporters are also.
We're still waiting on all the indictments against the entire Obama administration.
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Judge denies Oath Keepers leader’s request for special master ahead of seditious conspiracy trial
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta’s brief order came hours after Rhodes’s attorney had requested the special master appointment to assist in discovery, saying it spanned more than 10 terabytes of data. The Justice Department objected to the motion.
The use of a special master, a court-appointed official who carries out an action on its behalf, has come into the spotlight after former President Trump requested one to examine materials seized by the FBI at his Mar-a-Lago residence in August. The judge in that case granted the request .
“One of the most cost-effective methods for managing and dispensing discovery of such a massive volume is to engage a special master to help manage discovery,” Rhodes’s attorney wrote in the filing. “Special masters can promote efficiency in discovery, the phase of litigation that is most likely to break down and cause delays to case resolution.”
Has absolutely nothing to do with this article let alone the comment you are responding to
Your heroes are such zeroes and so impotent!
I invite you to go to your mentor's seeds with the same admonition for posting a plethora of additional articles on unrelated seeds.
If you are talking about whom I think you are, I don't recall him posting another article as a response to what someone has posted TO him. And if he is, it certainly isn't done with the malice and intent that some other people do. It is informative and has to do with what was posted to him. Not random shit.
Oh, so now it's about your perception of 'malice and intent?
Malice against whom with intent to do what?
Be specfic.
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See 3.3 and intent to taunt as THAT response had NOTHING to do with what was being responded to.
It appears the majority of the enablers/supporters of the trumpturd are able to dish it out but cannot take it.
You do this so well Dulay
Well gee Jim, as we can all see, post 3.3 hasn't been flagged for taunting.
So, who the fuck are you claiming was being tainted and why did you whine about it instead of flagging it?
Be specific.
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Is this like Oprah where every body gets a special master?
The inverted asshole will now fall into the dustpan of history.
Let me see if I have this straight: Last night came news that Durham had Danchenko on the FBI payroll during the Russia/collusion hoax. Danchenko goes to trial on October 10th. [deleted]
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See comment 5
Durham Inquiry Appears to Wind Down as Grand Jury Expires
WASHINGTON — When John Durham was assigned by the Justice Department in 2019 to examine the origins of the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, President Donald Trump and his supporters expressed a belief that the inquiry would prove that a “deep state” conspiracy including top Obama-era officials had worked to sabotage him.
Now Durham appears to be winding down his three-year inquiry without anything close to the results Trump was seeking. The grand jury that Durham has recently used to hear evidence has expired, and while he could convene another, there are currently no plans to do so, three people familiar with the matter said.
I'm certain that Danchenko doesn't think Durham is winding anything down!
“…Durham…”
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Oh, shoot! I was going to copy and paste that then make a general smart-ass remark.
Deflection, projection and denial. This trial solidifies the FBI impartial investigation TTPs so now the left is quickly moving into cover your ass mode celebrating nothing.
Nothing from Durham on Obama, Clinton, Holder, Comey, Brennen or anyone else the alt-right hates these days? Talk about deflection and denial. Also, from the article -
They lost the Sussmann case so why would you be so certain they'll win with Danchenko?
Maybe you should ask the person you quoted.
Okay then... like Durham you have little to nothing.
So he is going after a person that was being investigated when Obama was going in to office...
Next we will hear about someone in the Bush administration...
So it says the Grand Jury expired and there are no pans to continue it and the right wing is blaming the left wing for, I don't even know what anymore....
'They' don't know either. It's an uncontrolled kneejerk reaction at this point.
The hamburger they ate last night gave them cramps. That's our fault
It's a Liberal conspiracy doncha know. They are trying to swap out the patties for veggie burgers.
Typical Yahoo and NYT methods of "reporting" evidence and facts.
DOJ points out that Trump's legal filings don't align with his public statements about the Mar-a-Lago records
Trump "seeks to raise questions about the classification status of the records" but didn't "provide any evidence" that they had been declassified, DOJ said.
Prosecutors also previously noted that whether the records are classified has no bearing on if Trump committed a crime.
The Justice Department on Tuesday pointed out a key discrepancy in former President Donald Trump's legal arguments in the wake of the FBI's Mar-a-Lago search — none of his court filings back up his public claim that he had declassified all the government records seized in the search.
Trump "principally seeks to raise questions about the classification status of the records and their categorization under the Presidential Records Act ('PRA')," the department said in a new legal filing . "But Plaintiff does not actually assert—much less provide any evidence—that any of the seized records bearing classification markings have been declassified."
The filing came as part of the ongoing court fight between Trump and the DOJ over the appointment of a "special master" to review the seized records and sift out documents that might be protected by executive or attorney-client privilege. US District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, ruled in favor of Trump's request for a special master and barred the DOJ from using any of the seized records, until they had been reviewed, as part of its criminal investigation into Trump's handling of national security information.
But the department last week asked Cannon for a partial stay on her ruling, requesting that she allow prosecutors access to a set of just over 100 classified documents.
Meanwhile, though the former president has frequently said he had a "standing order" to declassify all the records that were moved to Mar-a-Lago, more than a dozen of his former aides told CNN they had no knowledge of such an order, and Trump's legal team has not made the claim in any of its filings.
They only said, in a Monday filing, that the government "has not proven" the records with classified markings were still classified and that "this issue is to be determined later."
Trump's lawyers' focus on whether the documents in question were classified or not also misses the point; none of the three laws, including the Espionage Act, that he's being investigated for violating depend on the classificaton of the records .
The Justice Department pointed that out in an earlier filing as well. Specifically, it pointed out that Section E of the Espionage Act, one of the three laws Trump is suspected of having violated, makes it a crime to retain any government records pertaining to the US's national defense, regardless of classification level.
The other two federal statutes Trump's suspected of having broken — 18 USC Section 2071 and 18 USC Section 1519 — criminalize the concealment, removal, and destruction of government records, also regardless of classification level.
In its Tuesday filing, the government argued that the issues Trump has raised with respect to his request for a special master are "ultimately ireelevant."
"Even if Plaintiff had declassified these records, and even if he somehow had categorized them as his 'personal' records for purposes of the [Presidential Records Act] — neither of which has been shown — nothing in the PRA or any other source of law establishes a plausible claim of privilege or any other justification for an injunction restricting the government's review and use of records at the center of an ongoing criminal and national security investigation," prosecutors said.
"And nothing in Plaintiff's Response rebuts the compelling public interest in granting the limited stay the government seeks," they added.
Read the original article on Business Insider
The projection, deflection, and denial of the whatshisname enablers/supporters is mind boggling.
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Well, ya know....some people here think they know more about journalism than the people who actually get paid to research and write stories.
Well gee Jasper, Durham could have requested an extension of the Grand Jury's term. The fact that he let their term expire without said request says volumes.
This is what we can expect from a republican run congress if they regain power. Nothing but investigations. They have a shitty platform that no one really agrees with so they do shit like this.
The "R"s have a platform?
No taxes and drill baby drill...
Oh, and Gay people are bad Mmmkay...
Don't forget abortion bans and entitlement meddling.
“The "R"s have a platform?”
Retribution, Retaliation, Revenge…the new three R’s
Retardation, repeat, retardation will be taught on Fox un news.
Don't forget book burnings....
Its amazing we actually have conservatives on this forum speaking up for this three and a half year waste of time and money. We were all promised that a deep state conspiracy to persecute Donald Trump would be uncovered and prosecuted by Durham. Nope.
I guess Durham decided to end his career with a whimper...
Such a complete waste of our taxpayer money.
Well, they've been sitting around for three years circle jerking each other while fantasizing about how Durham is going to 'take down' the libs and expose the Democrats supposed crimes. And don't worry, they won't ever admit it was a waste of time and money, they'll just claim some more Qanon 'deep state' fantasy nonsense that the Democrats must have somehow corrupted the investigation and dropping the case doesn't mean the Democrats aren't guilty of something.
Sure, when it's a Republican under investigation for inciting an insurrection or keeping top secret documents and lying to investigators about having returned them all they refuse to accept any possibility of guilt without an actual conviction, but when it comes to Democrats they're all assumed guilty of something even if the poorly educated conservatives accusing them of crimes are incapable of defining what they're guilty of.
I'm pretty sure elton john would agree to change a few lyrics to goodbye yellow-prick road...
Look for Durham to go into full denial mode a la Barr.
hopefully durham will get sucked into that DOJ corruption vortex of barr's and end up disbarred, broken, and humiliated.
The FBI and CIA investigations into Trump's Russian dealings were predicated on Trump and Co seeking out and meeting with clandestine agents of Russian State Intelligence Services over one hundred times in the lead up to the 2016 Presidential election...
Beginning by at least 2014 and continuing right up to election day in 2016 Trump was in secret negotiations with Vlad Putin to build a new Trump Tower in Moscow. He even offered Putin a luxury penthouse apartment as a bribe to get the deal.
Hillary Clinton retired from public service in January of 2013 making the false claims that she caused Trump to be investigated even more preposterous!
Trump got himself investigated by seeking out and meeting with and establishing relationships with known agents of Putin's Russian State Intelligence Services. Thus, the FBI and CIA would have been professionally neglect not to have investigated...
The FBI and CIA don't and won't explain themselves but those in the know recognize what is really what.