Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said Monday that Special Counsel John Durham’s Report confirms that the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump campaign for Russian collusion “was always Dems politicizing intelligence.”
“When I became Director of National Intelligence, I asked to see all U.S. intelligence of ‘Trump Russia collusion,’” Ratcliffe, who served as DNI at the tail-end of the Trump administration, wrote in a tweet soon after the report became public. “There was none—and I reported same to Special Counsel John Durham. His report confirms that fact—it was always Dems politicizing intelligence.”
The 300-page report published on Monday afternoon concludes “that the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report,” as Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong noted:
“Our investigation also revealed that senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities,” Durham’s report said, in apparent reference to the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded Fusion GPS “pee dossier” alleging collusion that the FBI relied on to investigate Trump.
Durham said before the allegation from an Australian diplomat that then-Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos told him the Trump campaign had dirt on Clinton, there was no evidence of any Trump campaign collusion with Russia. But despite this “unevaluated intelligence information,” the FBI “swiftly opened an investigation, known as “Crossfire Hurricane.”
Durham would add that then-Deputy Assistant Director for Counter Intelligence Peter Strozk “immediately” opened the probe at the direction of then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
Moreover, the report states that “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
Related: MSNBC’s Weissmann: Durham Report “Big Fat Nothing,” “Russia Interfered in the 2016 Election”
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