A newly declassified document from former Special Counsel John Durham’s report suggests the Obama-era FBI ignored intelligence that indicated Hillary Clinton’s campaign or Russian disinformation fueled allegations of collusion between President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
The disclosure of the annex, which still has some redactions, comes more than two years after Durham completed his investigation and heavily criticized the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe into alleged links between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Trump’s second administration declassified the section as the president and members of his team demanded accountability for what they deemed to be a Russia collusion hoax.
One key section of the classified addendum to the Durham Report says the “FBI was fully alerted to the possibility that at least some of the information it was receiving about the Trump campaign might have its origin either with the Clinton campaign or its supporters, or alternatively, was the product of Russian disinformation. Despite this awareness, the FBI appears to have dismissed the [intelligence information] as not credible without any investigative steps actually having been taken to either corroborate or disprove the allegations.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a lead Russiagate investigator who pushed for the declassification of the annex, released the document on Thursday.
“Based on the Durham annex, the Obama FBI failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton’s political gain, which was ultimately done through the Steele Dossier and other means,” Grassley said in a statement. “These intelligence reports and related records, whether true or false, were buried for years. History will show that the Obama and Biden administrations’ law enforcement and intelligence agencies were weaponized against President Trump. This political weaponization has caused critical damage to our institutions and is one of the biggest political scandals and cover-ups in American history. The new Trump administration has a tremendous responsibility to the American people to fix the damage done and do so with maximum speed and transparency.”
In 2020, when he served as director of national intelligence, now-CIA Director John Ratcliffe unveiled documents that showed federal officials referred Clinton to the FBI for investigation after obtaining “insight” into a Russian intelligence analysis that alleged she approved a campaign plan to link Trump to Russia’s hacking operations to distract from the controversy over her unauthorized use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state.
The annex in Durham’s report says FBI personnel, including then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, shared the intelligence regarding the potential Clinton campaign plan with high-ranking career officials at Department of Justice on March 31, 2016, and affirms that “multiple high-ranking” U.S. officials were apprised of the situation, including an August 3, 2016, briefing in the White House by CIA Director John Brennan to President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director Comey, among others. It says notes from Brennan show the CIA sent an investigative referral to the FBI in September of 2016 that included the “purported Clinton campaign plan.”
One of the most heavily redacted parts of the annex says the CIA prepared a written assessment in 2017 on the “authenticity and veracity” of the intelligence described in the referral memo. “The CIA stated that it did not assess that the above [redacted] memoranda, or [redacted] hacked U.S. communications, to be the product of Russian fabrications,” it adds.
Durham testified to Congress in 2023 that agents on the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team were not made aware of the intelligence, and his report indicated the “Clinton Plan intelligence” could have been helpful to them. The report pointed to British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s now-discredited anti-Trump dossier, stemming from research funded by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, that the FBI was found to have improperly used to secure FISA surveillance warrants against onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. It also referenced the unfounded secret backchannel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank that Clinton and her team promoted in the run-up to the 2016 election.
“Whether or not the Clinton Plan intelligence was based on reliable or unreliable information, or was ultimately true or false, it should have prompted FBI personnel to immediately undertake an analysis of the information and to act with far greater care and caution when receiving, analyzing, and relying upon materials of partisan origins, such as the Steele Reports and the Alfa Bank allegations,” Durham’s report said. “The FBI also should have disseminated the Clinton Plan intelligence more widely among those responsible for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation so that they could effectively incorporate it into their analysis and decision-making, and their representations to the OI attorneys and, ultimately, the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court].”
During an interview on Fox News over the weekend, Ratcliffe told “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo that he had been working to secure the release of a classified section from Durham’s report.
“What hasn’t come out yet and what’s going to come out is the underlying intelligence that I have spent the last few months making recommendations about final declassification and sent that to the Department of Justice,” he said. “That will come out in the John Durham report classified annex. And what that intelligence shows, Maria, is that part of this was a Hillary Clinton plan, but part of it was an FBI plan to be an accelerant to that fake Steele dossier, to those fake Russia collusion claims by pouring oil on the fire, by amplifying the lie and burying the truth of what Hillary Clinton was up to.”
Ratcliffe went on to explain that “much of” the testimony that Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, and Brennan provided to Durham or Congress in the past five years “is, frankly, completely inconsistent with what our underlying intelligence that is about to be declassified in the Durham annex, what that reflects.”
Acknowledging how Attorney General Pam Bondi has a new “strike force” tasked with evaluating the evidence relating the Obama administration’s efforts to drive the Russia collusion allegations, the CIA director added, “It is a different Department of Justice, a different FBI, and an opportunity to look at how these people really did conspire to run a hoax, a fraud on the American people and against Donald Trump’s presidency.”
Comey testified before the Senate in 2020, claiming, “In the main, it was done by the book, it was appropriate, and it was essential that it be done.” He also conceded there “were parts of it that were concerning.”
In an op-ed published by The New York Times this week, Brennan and Clapper made a brief mention of Durham as they pushed back on Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s claim that members of the Obama administration waged a “treasonous conspiracy” to undermine Trump.
“The special counsel John Durham, who was appointed during Mr. Trump’s first term to investigate how the Russia probe was conducted, similarly found no evidence of an Obama administration conspiracy against Mr. Trump,” they wrote. “But he affirmed the findings of the special counsel Robert Mueller, who conducted a separate investigation into the allegations, which found ample evidence of Russian interference in the election.”