(Washington) The federal police were satisfied with questionable information to open an investigation into suspicions of collusion between Moscow and Donald Trump during the presidential election of 2016, tackles a special prosecutor in a report published Monday.
John Durham believes that the FBI relied on “raw intelligence that had not been analyzed or corroborated” to launch its investigations and then lacked “objectivity” in the management of this very political file.
“The Russian investigation”, which darkened the first part of the Republican president’s mandate without bringing out solid evidence of collusion, has always been denounced by Donald Trump as a “witch hunt” orchestrated by his opponents.
Shortly before the end of his mandate, his government had entrusted John Durham with the mission of investigating the origins of this inquiry. After three years of investigations, he delivered his conclusions which span more than 300 pages.
In addition to the weakness of the elements that initiated the investigation, the special prosecutor accuses the federal police of having acted according to a system of two weights, two measures.
“The speed and manner in which the FBI” decided to investigate Donald Trump “contrasts with the approach previously taken in a case of possible foreign interference in the campaign” of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, he writes, in also pinning the “cavalier attitude” of certain investigators.
For him, “the FBI and the Department of Justice must recognize that a lack of analytical rigor, confirmation biases and an over-reliance on sources linked to political opponents have prevented investigators from considering alternative hypotheses and ‘act with appropriate objectivity’.
However, the special prosecutor does not recommend specific prosecutions or reforms.
“The answer is not to create new rules but to reiterate loyalty to the old ones,” he advocates.
Donald Trump, who is seeking a second term in 2024, was quick to praise his work. “After extensive research, Special Prosecutor John Durham has concluded that the FBI should never have launched the Trump-Russia investigation,” he wrote on Truth Social. “In other words, the American public got screwed,” he adds.
As for the FBI, he assured that the facts described by Mr. Durham had already led to “dozens of corrective actions”. “If they had been in place in 2016, the blunders identified in this report could have been prevented,” commented one of its spokespersons.