A long-awaited
report by Republican-appointed special counsel John Durham
failed to find the “crime of the century” that ex-President Donald Trump said targeted him at the center of the
Russia investigation. But it delivered him a potential political payoff nonetheless.
The 300-page conclusion to a three-year probe also dealt another blow to the Federal Bureau of Investigation over its handling of the reputation-shredding 2016 election.
Durham said that the bureau’s full-scale probe into multiple links between the Trump campaign and Russians should never have been launched, arguing that investigators “discounted or willfully ignored” information that did not support preliminary theories that there was collusion between Trump and Russia. And he called on the Justice Department to appoint an official to oversee politically sensitive probes. But while Durham criticized confirmation bias and mistakes in the FBI, he did not unveil any new prosecutions – undermining Trump’s predictions of a sweeping purge of the bureau – and had no recommendations for further reforms in the FBI.