WASHINGTON – Former Twitter President Donald J. Trump recently issued a sarcastic statement on the continuing public silence of John H. Durham, the special adviser who has been investigating the Trump-Russia investigation since May 2019.
“Where’s Durham?” said Trump, who repeatedly predicted before last year’s election that Durham’s investigation would prove a conspiracy against him. Is he a living, breathing person? Will there ever be a Durham report? ‘
Mr. Durham publicly ignored the complaint and the scope of his investigation remains opaque. According to people familiar with the investigation, one aspect has recently come into consideration: Mr. Durham used the FBI’s handling of a notorious dossier of political opposition research, before and after the bureau began using it to get court permission to eavesdrop. a former Trump campaign adviser in 2016 and 2017 and questioned witnesses who may have insight into the case.
In particular, Mr. Durham obtained documents from the Brookings Institution related to Igor Danchenko, a Russian researcher who worked there a decade ago and later helped gather rumors about Trump and Russia for the research, known as the Steele dossier, according to people familiar with the request.
By asking for the dossier, Mr. Durham focused at least in part on investigating an aspect of the investigation that had already been exposed by a general report by the Department of Justice inspector in 2019 and led to reforms by the FBI and foreign affairs. Intelligence Supervision Court.
A Durham spokesman declined to comment.
Asked whether the Special Advocate had informed his new supervisor, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, a Justice Department spokesman would only respond to a statement by Mr. Garland as nominated show. ‘If it is confirmed,’ he said, ‘is one of the first things I’m going to do, with Mr. Durham speaks and learns the status of his investigation. ‘
In February, a few weeks before the Senate Mr. Garland confirmed it, Mr. Durham old personnel files and other documents relating to Mr. Danchenko obtained a summons from the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think tank. Mr. Danchenko worked there from 2005 to 2010.
Mr. Danchenko traveled to Russia in 2016 and gathered rumors about Mr. Trump and his associates on behalf of Christopher Steele, who drafted the dossier as a subcontractor for an investigative firm that is indirectly paid by Democrats to look into any Trump-Russia ties.
Michael Cavadel, the chief executive of Brookings, filed the summons for records and other material about Mr. Danchenko confirmed and said that it was received on December 31 and that the brainstorming took until February to collect the files and to Mr. Durham’s team in part because the office was closed during the pandemic.
“In accordance with the practices in such matters, Brookings has provided the responsive documents, none of which contain information related to the reports known as the Steele dossier,” Mr. Cavadel said.
Last September, the then Attorney General, William P. Barr, announced that Mr. From 2009 to 2011, Danchenko was the subject of an FBI counter-intelligence investigation that assessed his contacts with several suspected Russian intelligence officials, including at the Russian embassy.
Skeptics of the Steele dossier have speculated that Russian intelligence has used Mr. Danchenko or his sources to sow disinformation, to sow further chaos. Mr. Danchenko was never charged and denied that he once a Russian agent, he also noted that during his time in Brookings he proposed an analysis of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia: evidence that Mr. Putin had plagiarized parts of his dissertation.)
People familiar with the investigation said Mr. Durham also asked questions that suggest a focus on skepticism about how the FBI has approached issues that could undermine the credibility of the docket.
For example, it is said that the team of mr. Durham asked why the FBI, after arresting Mr. Danchenko identified as a major source for the dossier and interviewed with him in early 2017, did not tell the supervisory court that he once agreed on the subject of a counter-intelligence investigation.
It is said that Durham is also interested in a meeting between the FBI and Mr. Steele in early October 2016 in Rome, shortly before the bureau filed its first wiretapping application using information from its dossier.
Last month, Yahoo News published an article containing information that overlaps with the claims in the dossier, and the FBI later learned that Mr. Steele was a source for it, which asked the bureau to sever its relationship with him. The office at the time, as the bureau said in its wiretapping application to the court, assumed that the source was someone else who had received a copy of the dossier.
Durham is said to have asked why FBI officials at that October meeting apparently did not ask Steele if he was the source of the article – before using his information to apply for permission to the former Trump adviser, Carter Page, to listen.
The focus has raised the possibility that Mr. Durham investigated whether FBI officials knowingly misled the supervisory court. But if Mr. Durham has found reliable evidence of such a crime – as opposed to sloppy investigative work – he has yet to file such charges.
Mr. Durham interviewed former CIA director John O. Brennan in August, but told him he was not the target of any criminal investigation. But he has not yet interviewed former FBI officials who held senior roles in 2016 and were demonized by Trump supporters, including former director James B. Comey; his former deputy Andrew G. McCabe; and a former senior anti-intelligence agent, Peter Strzok, according to people familiar with the matter.
To the extent that a final Durham report focuses on the criticism of the FBI’s handling of issues related to the Steele dossier, it would run the risk of undermining the ground already covered by the 2019 report by the Inspector- General of the Department of Justice, Michael E. Horowitz, to re-enter.
Mr. Horowitz has already revealed the fact that the FBI handled his wiretapping applications in numerous ways, including revealing material facts that law enforcement officials did not tell the court and which could have their case for receiving authorization or renewal of the wiretapping undermine. about the dossier.
Horowitz’s report also revealed that Danchenko was a counterintelligence investigator while working at Brookings, in a footnote initially classified before Barr decided to make it public.
The report also focuses on criticism of the FBI’s failure to ask Steele in October 2016 if he played a role in the Yahoo News article.
And the misconduct of the only person who Mr. Durham has sued to date – Kevin Clinesmith, a former FBI attorney who showed an email to a colleague during preparations to extend the eavesdropping, which prevents another problem from coming to light internally – was uncovered by the investigation of mr. Horowitz. (Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to falsifying the email but insisted he did not intentionally mislead his colleague, was sentenced.)
Mr. Barr called Mr. Durham was instructed to investigate any possible misconduct by Trump-Russia investigators in the spring of 2019, at a time when Mr. Trump and his supporters pushed the idea that the investigation was a conspiracy against him. . While the work of mr. Durham was opaque, the reports of people familiar with his investigation made clear he was pursuing various Trumpian conspiracy theories and grievances.
In his attempt to discredit the Russia investigation, Mr. Trump and his allies regularly put it together with the flawed Steele dossier. In fact, the Page eavesdropping was a small part of the overall effort, and Horowitz’s report showed that it played no role in the FBI’s decision to open the July 2016 counter-intelligence investigation.
While the FBI revealed the FBI’s eavesdropping applications, Horowitz’s report also concluded that it opened the overall investigation legally on an adequate basis. When the inspector general delivered the report, Mr. Durham intervened with an unusual public statement and said he did not agree with Mr. Horowitz that the opening of the investigation has not been properly determined.
Mr. Durham did not provide any details, but Mr. Horowitz later told Congress that Mr. Durham told him he thought the FBI should start the investigation as a “preliminary investigation”, rather than conduct a “complete” investigation.