Seasoned prosecutor John Durham‘s restrained approach to investigating how top FBI brass may have cozied up to Hillary Clinton‘s 2016 campaign vexed members of his special counsel team, journalist Seymour Hersh reported on Thursday.
Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner who recently faced controversy by alleging that the United States blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, wrote in his latest Substack article how the “real story” of Russiagate involves FBI officials who “chose to look the other way” when the Clinton team cooked up ways to link then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia that culminated in British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s now-discredited dossier and unfounded allegations of an Alfa Bank backchannel.
“It became evident to some members of Durham’s staff that the real story was not about whether or not Trump had pee parties in a Moscow hotel room — one of the headline-producing allegations in the Steele Dossier that consumed the Washington press corps in the aftermath of Trump’s victory in the 2016 election,” Hersh wrote. “The issue was whether the Clinton campaign, in its constant leaking of false accusations and false data, had crossed a line.”
“I was told that there was tension and frustration over Durham’s initial lack of interest, or reluctance, to go beyond his investigative mandate and look closely at the possibility that some senior FBI officials had openly joined ranks with the Clinton campaign, with its drumbeat of spurious allegations, because, in some cases, of a shared belief in the importance of a Clinton victory in the fall election,” Hersh said. “Another factor, I was told, was the possibility of promotions — even to high-level Justice Department offices — in a potential Clinton administration.”
There has already been some reporting on consternation within the Durham team’s ranks. Durham’s No. 2 prosecutor, Nora Dannehy, resigned in 2020 in what The New York Times described as a “culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics.” The newspaper also reported that two other prosecutors objected to indicting former Clinton campaign Michael Sussmann, who was acquitted last year by a D.C. jury on a charge of lying to the FBI.
The full extent of what Durham ultimately discovered about “Clinton Plan intelligence” during his years-long inquiry remains shrouded, but the Department of Justice last month released his 306-page report. It made headlines for how it heavily criticized the FBI’s investigation into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
“Durham, to his credit, did follow the leads that came to his office, but he left them in secrecy—perhaps in the Classified Appendix or perhaps completely off the record,” Hersh wrote. “He was seen by some as being mandated only to investigate FBI management shortcomings and believed the public needed a full accounting of the FBI bungling.”
“It was not clear whether Durham, had he decided to expand the parameters of his inquiry to include the implications of the intelligence about the Clinton campaign, would have been allowed to do so,” Hersh said. “As Durham himself writes, ‘any attempted prosecution premised on the Clinton Plan intelligence would face what in all likelihood would be insurmountable classification issues given the highly sensitive nature of the information itself.'”
Durham is scheduled to testify about his investigation before two committees next month. The special counsel is set to speak with the House Intelligence Committee in a closed session on June 20 and appear before the House Judiciary Committee in a public setting on June 21, according to The Washington Examiner.