Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called on the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman to have a hearing on the report by John Durham, a special counsel tasked with probing the FBI’s 2016–2017 investigation into Trump’s campaign.
“The Durham Report is a damning indictment of the FBI under James Comey and the operations of the Department of Justice,” Graham, a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement on Monday.
“I am calling on Chairman [Dick] Durbin to quickly hold a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Durham Report to fulfill the Committee’s oversight obligations.”
The senator’s call echoed the request of his counterpart in the House. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said on Monday that they have reached out to the DOJ to have Durham testify about the report next week.
Durham concluded the three-year-long examination of the FBI’s conduct in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, finding that the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) “failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law.”
Durham submitted the 300-page report (pdf) to Attorney General Merrick Garland on May 12. The unclassified document (pdf) was delivered to the Senate and House Committee on the Judiciary on May 15 before it was made available to the public later that day.
According to Durham’s report, the FBI’s rush to open the investigation into Trump’s campaign was “based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence” and reflects a departure from how the bureau approached other politically sensitive investigations in 2016.
One example of this was the FBI’s handling of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server to transmit top-secret government emails, the report indicated. It noted that the FBI and DOJ restricted an inquiry into the Clinton Foundation so that little to no investigative activity could occur in the months leading up to the election.
But the agency had a different attitude toward Trump, Durham concluded, as evident by his observation 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 Crossfire Hurricane investigation.” Crossfire Hurricane was the codename for the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign.
Agents “repeatedly disregarded important requirements” when they made surveillance requests on the Trump campaign—initiated under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—in the absence of a “genuine belief” that there was a probable cause to investigate the target, the report found.
In the Monday statement, Graham said the report underscores a trend that “the Rule of Law in America is subservient to political outcomes.”
“Unfortunately, when it comes to the American Left you will not hear about the Durham Report. The American Left celebrates bad actors like these because they had a ‘noble cause’—taking down a political opponent. It is a case of the ends justifying the means,” the congressman said.
“I hope they will prove me wrong and come out and make clear that the FBI and DOJ violated the constitutional protections of many, including Donald Trump, but I am not holding my breath.”
Graham said his advice to those affected by the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was to “hire a good lawyer” to file lawsuits.
“Those responsible for Crossfire Hurricane destroyed reputations and lives, all in the name of politics. Someone needs to be held accountable for using the law as a political weapon and ruining innocent peoples’ lives.”
Trump also responded to the findings of Durham’s report, describing the FBI’s investigation of him as a “disgrace.”
“I, and much more importantly, the American public have been victims of this long-running and treasonous charade started by the Democrats—started by Comey,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News on Monday. “There must be a heavy price to pay for putting our country through this.”
In a statement released on Monday, the FBI acknowledged mistakes in its 2016–2017 investigation of the Trump campaign, saying the bureau had rolled out multiple reforms to address them.
“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,” the FBI wrote in the statement.
“Had those reforms been in place in 2016, the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented.”
Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.
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