WASHINGTON — It became a regular litany of grievances from President Donald Trump and his supporters: The investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia was a witch hunt, they maintained, that had been opened without any solid basis, went on too long and found no proof of collusion. Egged on by Trump, Attorney General William Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To l
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But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep-state plot alleged by Trump and suspected by Barr.
Now, as Durham works on a final report, the interviews by the Times provide new details of how he and Barr sought to recast the scrutiny of the 2016 Trump campaign’s myriad if murky links to Russia as unjustified and itself a crime. At the time Barr was confirmed, he told aides that he already suspected that intelligence abuses played a role in igniting the Russia investigation — and that unearthing any wrongdoing would be a priority.
The inspector general revealed errors and omissions in wiretap applications targeting a former Trump campaign adviser and determined that an FBI lawyer had doctored an email in a way that kept one of those problems from coming to light. By summer 2020, it was clear that the hunt for evidence supporting Barr’s hunch about intelligence abuses had failed. But he waited until after the 2020 election to publicly concede that there had turned out to be no sign of “foreign government activity” and that the CIA had “stayed in its lane” after all.
Trump was stoking a belief among his supporters that Durham might charge former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden. That proved too much for Barr, who in May 2020 clarified that “our concern of potential criminality is focused on others.” The memos were part of a trove provided to the CIA by a Dutch spy agency, which had infiltrated the servers of its Russian counterpart. The memos were said to make demonstrably inconsistent, inaccurate or exaggerated claims, and some U.S. analysts believed Russia may have deliberately seeded them with disinformation.
But Benardo and Wasserman Schultz said they had never even met, let alone communicated about Clinton’s emails. In a statement provided to the Times by Soros’ foundation, Benardo reiterated that he never met or corresponded with Wasserman Schultz, and he said that “if such documentation exists, it’s of course made up.”
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