The FBI is harshly criticized
in a new long awaited report
on the origins
of the Trump-Russia investigation.
The veteran prosecutor, Don
Durham, says the agency ignored
its own rules and procedures
and was way too quick to take a tip
about the 2016 Trump campaign
and accelerated
into a full blown investigation
of whether there was communication
or collusion with Russia.
But Durham proposed
no new charges
and only modest FBI
reforms in his final report
and his findings,
while harshly critical of the FBI,
come nowhere
close to how they're now being portrayed
by the former president
and some of his allies.
Let's get some insights
now from CNN's Evan Perez
and the former federal prosecutor,
Elliott Williams.
It is a damning report from Mr.
Durham, essentially
saying that they got this tip
and they should have taken their time
and explored it.
And instead,
because of what he sees
as a predisposition against Trump,
they rushed into a full blown
investigation,
which gives them a lot more power.
They can do a lot more things.
He said they used raw
and analyzed
and uncorroborated intelligence.
He believes some personnel involved
had a predisposition against Trump,
that there was no evidence of collusion.
But he doesn't recommend
wholesale new charges
or any wholesale changes.
So essentially, since they screwed up.
Right. But it's not a giant problem.
Is that fair?
Well, I mean, look, it is a big problem
that the FBI made a lot of the mistakes
that were documented in this report.
The problem for for Durham
is that he was brought in
after a very, very exhaustive
inspector general report, found
pretty much everything
he just described in 2019.
He was appointed
because the former president
was obsessed
with this idea that he was spied on
that there was a
that there was a deep state cabal
that was out to get him.
There was all of these things
that that were promised that,
you know, Durham himself,
you know
raised expectations
of what he was going to find.
And none of that panned out in the end.
What Durham found is that, you know,
these are human beings.
There were very,
very extraordinary circumstances.
You had a candidate. Right.
Who was being shunned
by the establishment.
So he brought in
a lot of these third rate people,
some of whom had,
you know, issues
and connections in Russia.
And so that is partly what drove the FBI.
They made a lot of mistakes.
But it appears, according to Durham,
it wasn't a political bias.
It was simply confirmation bias.
It was
it was what prosecutors
and sometimes what FBI agents do
at the beginning of this.
It might be hard
because this is for years,
it might be hard for people
to remember the origins.
Trump Attorney
General Bill Barr
asked John Durham, a veteran prosecutor,
to look into this way back
then at the beginning.
This is Trump on the Hugh Hewitt Show.
So he believe this is going to be huge.
I think you're going to
have a very interesting report
coming out with Durham.
I believe it's bigger
and far more far reaching
and far more powerful
than anyone ever thought possible.
Now, Donald
Trump, a candidate for president
again, was very quick to rush out a fund
fundraising email with the headline.
I was framed it goes on to say,
This is horrible.
It was not that he is exaggerating
what Mr. Durham found.
However,
I don't want to use the fact
that he's exaggerating
to not get at the fact that Mr..
You're right.
The IG, Mr.
Horowitz, did find a lot of this, too.
But these are some very important issues
that Chris Wray,
the FBI director, acknowledged,
saying We've put a lot of reforms
in place already.
Because of these problems.
Look, I will be the first
to tell you, having worked
at the Justice Department
for six years, that if there is bias or
the use of uncorroborated information
in evidence
it should be dealt with appropriately.
The simple fact is
there are plenty of rules
at both the judge department
and the FBI for getting out
political bias and
and predisposition to things
to the point about predisposition.
It's an important one.
Everybody has a predisposition
in some way.
John, the question is,
does it affect the work? And if it does.
How do you deal with it
on the back end now?
Look, you can change the rules
to make them different,
then propose
any of those such things here.
You can prosecute
people who broke the law.
But look,
they tried to bring three prosecutions.
Two of them ended up going to trial
and not guilty.
One of them ended up
pleading out for only probation.
There simply wasn't
the widespread problems
that certainly the former president,
the former attorney general
wanted to find here and simply did not.
And I mean, look, here we are in 20, 23.
And I know a lot of people
are really tired of talking about 20, 20.
So here we go. We're talking about 2016.
And this is what this report is.
It's kind of a little bit of a
like you know,
something like a message in a bottle
right from 2016.
But it led to a special counsel
investigation, led to an impeachment,
which is why this is
sometimes something
worth revisiting history. Don't make.
Durham goes out of his way to to to
actually say that
what Mueller found was very important
and he seems to believe that
what Mueller did was was legitimate
But and so another point in
this is his show
the headline of the story
you wrote about this.
Durham interviewed Hillary Clinton
on an alleged plan to tie Trump
to Russia, found no provable
criminal offense. What does that mean?
It means that in the end,
the government officials
who were handling
this did not commit a crime.
You know, they were made mistakes
and they should have looked at this
and maybe had second thoughts
about what they were doing with Trump.
And they didn't.
And that's what he found.
He recommends Durham
like a not
what I would call an ombudsman.
That's why we call it the news business.
Somebody
if there's a politically
sensitive investigation,
someone who's not involved
to be there to question
just a question,
everything along the way,
there are things that will happen
already.
What they've done
is that they've made sure
there's more
approvals needed for types
of these types of investigations.
We'll watch as it plays out.
Gentlemen, thank you both.