OPINION:
The FBI’s sins descended so low in the Trump-Russia saga that it has taken two voluminous investigations by the Justice Department’s inspector general and now special counsel John Durham to expose and condemn.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 2019 bombshell was that the FBI broke over a dozen rules to obtain court-approved wiretaps on Carter Page, a volunteer on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. In the process, the bureau became a pimp for the Christopher Steele dossier.
The Hillary Clinton-financed dossier is America’s worst political hoax, yet the FBI stood behind its falsehoods in sworn affidavits to judges. Then-FBI Director James Comey took it to blindside Mr. Trump, who was then president-elect, at Trump Tower in an apparent attempt to elicit an instant Russian conspiracy confession.
Mr. Comey would later demand the intelligence community become as enamored of the dossier as he was. Mr. Comey demanded they put its anti-Trump claims in the Obama administration’s official Russia report. The intelligence community refused, calling Mr. Steele’s work an “internet rumor.”
Now Mr. Durham has written Volume 2, as it were, the first official dossier fact-check. His final report, which was released Monday, expresses shock and disbelief at how low the FBI traveled to align itself with partisans and try to unseat a U.S. president.
“Our investigation … 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,” Mr. Durham wrote. “This information in part triggered and sustained Crossfire Hurricane.”
(Mr. Durham is saying is that the fictitious dossier sustained the entire debacle.)
“In particular,” Mr. Durham added, “there was significant reliance on investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents. The Department did not adequately examine or question these materials and the motivations of those providing them, even when at about the same time the Director of the FBI [Comey] and others learned of significant and potentially contrary intelligence.”
(Mr. Durham is saying that the FBI knew the dossier was shaky but kept using it because getting the conservative Trump was too much fun.)
Some FBI mistakes.
Charles Dolan is a Washington creature — public relations consultant by day, Hillary Clinton loyalist by night. One of his employers was the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s outfit. He made business trips to Moscow and hobnobbed with senior Putin aides such as the dictator’s spokesman.
In 2016, the year of the dossier, Mr. Dolan also hung out with Russian Igor Danchenko. He was the No. 1 paid source for Mr. Steele, a former British spy Christopher Steele. This is at the same time Mr. Steele was tapping out dossier chapters in London and sending it to Mrs. Clinton’s operative Fusion GPS in Washington, which sent the allegations to the media and FBI.
Mr. Durham writes of the amazing coincidences of Mr. Dolan speaking to Russians whose names then showed up as dossier items, such as Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s supposed trip to Prague to cover up Trump computer hacking. And then there is the item about Russian diplomat Mikhail Kalugin, who was supposedly spirited out of Washington because he did the hacking. Neither Prague nor fleeing happened.
To Mr. Durham’s staff, Mr. Dolan denied or could not remember certain encounters. Still, Mr. Durham concluded that he was Mr. Danchenko’s source for the most titillating dossier morsel: That Mr. Trump frolicked with prostitutes at the Moscow Ritz. Given that Mr. Dolan had visited the hotel and talked to staff, Mr. Durham wrote: “In light of these facts, there appears to be a real likelihood that Dolan was the actual source of much of the Ritz Carlton … information contained in the Steele Reports.”
Here’s the bizarre part. The FBI learned of Mr. Dolan early on from the man himself, Mr. Steele. But agents never interviewed Mr. Dolan, never talked to the man who mingled in all the camps — Washington, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Danchenko and the Kremlin.
Some FBI personnel detailed to Robert Mueller’s special Russia investigation wanted to interview him. But someone higher up nixed the idea.
Here’s another FBI mystery.
Mr. Danchenko was once the subject of an FBI investigation into whether he was a Russian spy. According to Durham court filings, colleagues at the Brookings Institution said he offered money for secrets once they got inside the Obama administration. (An jury in Arlington, Virginia, found Mr. Danchenko not guilty of a charge of lying to FBI agents over his professed conversation with a nonexistent source.)
The Brookings scholars reported the offer to the FBI in 2009. The FBI opened a case but could not find Mr. Danchenko, so the bureau dropped it.
None of this weighed on the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team as they paid Mr. Danchenko hundreds of thousands of dollars as a confidential human source, or CHS.
Mr. Durham was flabbergasted.
“It is extremely concerning,” he wrote, “that the FBI failed to deal with the prior unresolved counterespionage case on Danchenko. Given Danchenko’s known contacts with Russian intelligence officers and his documented prior pitch for classified information, the Crossfire Hurricane team’s failure to properly consider and address the espionage case prior to opening Danchenko as a CHS is difficult to explain, particularly given their awareness that Danchenko was the linchpin to the uncorroborated allegations contained in the Steele Reports.”
The FBI ended up paying Mr. Danchenko lots of money over four years. It offered Mr. Steele $1 million to prove his dossier. He did not.
Mr. Durham summed up the dossier history: “The FBI was not able to corroborate a single substantive allegation in the Steele Reports. Nevertheless, the Steele Reports would form the foundation for the narrative that a U.S. presidential campaign was actively engaged in ‘a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation’ with a foreign adversary.”
The “well-developed” quote was attributed to Mr. Danchenko, who sourced it to a supposed Trump insider whom Mr. Durham said he fabricated.
How has the FBI dossier gang fared post-Crossfire Hurricane? The New York-Washington liberal establishment has given them book deals, TV gigs and lasting admiration for making Donald Trump’s life miserable.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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