Attorney General Pam Bondi last week directed federal prosecutors to conduct a grand jury investigation into allegations that the Obama administration created intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Her orders are similar to President Donald Trump’s first term, when General Patney Bill Barr claimed that “governmental power was used to monitor American citizens.” Barr hired John Durham to lead a four-year investigation that caused the FBI to commit many actions and investigate Trump and Russia.
However, Durham's long-term investigation has not led to any criminal charges (or allegations of material misconduct) related to the CIA and the intelligence community in concluding that Russia interferes in the 2016 election and hopes to help Trump win.
Essentially, Bundy now asks her prosecutors to investigate a period in U.S. history that has been scrutinized and re-examined for more than eight years. It is the latest in a series of prosecution moves, with Trump’s Justice Department struggling to hunt down his perceived political opponents and enemies.
“John Durham can't wait to file criminal charges. And he's not close to the type of charge or the type of player they're talking about here,” said CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elie Honig.
“This is the fifth bite of the same apple,” Honig said. “If they want to go this route again, I have no reason to think they will do better unless they completely manipulate the facts here.”
Bondy's new investigation was caused by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, who has fired and released several sets of documents in recent weeks, claiming she was a “inciting conspiracy” alleging that Obama officials should be prosecuted to create Russian interference in elections.
“I don't know what the alleged Durham or others were allegedly unable to put these points together and ultimately show the truth to the American people,” Gabbard told Fox Business's Maria Bartiromo last month why there were no investigations like Durham at the time, and no evidence of the allegations she made.
“I really can't understand – there's no reason or logic to explain why they failed,” she continued. “Maria, the only logical conclusion I can directly imply here is that there is a direct intention to cover up the truth about what happened and the person in charge, and the wide network of ways to check on this inflammatory plot, and who is exactly responsible for executing it.”
Although Durham's investigation focused primarily on FBI lapses recorded by the Justice Department Inspector General, Gabbard's allegations are now targeting the CIA and the intelligence community.
Durham found that the intelligence community's assessment of Russian election interventions (which details social media influence and cyber operations directed by President Vladimir Putin) was one of several investigations into Moscow's Moscow operation in 2016, which contributed to our understanding of Russia's election intervention efforts. ”
Durham was the focus of Gabbard's re-examination when asked in 2023 about the CIA and the intelligence community's January 2017 assessments detailing Russia's election intervention.
But at the White House podium last month, Gabbard claimed that Obama administration officials deliberately pushed for false narratives about Russian election intervention, claiming that “the evidence we found and directly released our issued evidence, which shows that President Obama led the production of this intelligence assessment.”
In her allegations, Gabbard blends the conclusions that the intelligence community is actually in the assessment.
Gabbard, for example, cited various intelligence assessments since 2016, saying that Russians have not changed the election results through cyberattacks targeting infiltrating the voting system. But the intelligence community never found any votes changed in the first place.
She also declassified and released a report from the Republican House Intelligence Committee that said the intelligence community's assessment was a thin and ignorant evidence of Putin's preference for Trump over Hillary Clinton. However, unlike Gabbard, the House report did not consider intelligence to be “made” or that there was no Russian election intervention.
Democrats accuse Gabbard and Trump of using Russian investigative documents to try to disperse the craze around Jeffrey Epstein’s archives. They believe that Gabbard's allegations were investigated by Justice Department Inspector General Robert Mueller, and the investigation by the Justice Department Inspector General and the Senate Intelligence Committee, all of which concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 general election.
“After years of investigation, John Durham confirmed what we already know: There is no big plot that constitutes Donald Trump,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Supreme Democratic Senate Mark Warner. “As we know, Russia interferes in our elections from bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee reports and multiple independent investigations to help Trump win.”
Durham's report, which is highly critical of the FBI's decision to investigate Trump and Russia, concluded that the agency did not find “any actual evidence of collusion” between the two and failed to take basic investigative steps before launching a years-long investigation. During his four-year investigation, he prosecuted three people, resulting in a low-level FBI attorney and two acquitted guilty pleas.
His report is more concerned about the FBI's actions than the CIA and the intelligence community. However, in 2019 and 2020, many reports showed that Durham and Barr tried to ask CIA officials about their findings of interference in the 2016 Russian election.
Through a new grand jury investigation, it is not clear that Bundy specifically hopes prosecutors investigate those who will even lead the investigation. The Attorney General has not spoken publicly about the grand jury investigation. Last month, she announced a strike force to “investigate potential next legal steps, which could stem from the disclosure of DNI Gabbard.”
Gabbard is not the only Trump official to publish documents and recommend crimes related to Russia and the 2016 election.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe also released comments last month on the intelligence community's 2017 assessment, criticizing Putin's conclusions of trying to help Trump.
Ratcliffe's review said that while “the overall assessment is considered defensible”, it reached conclusions about Putin “through the atypical and corrupt process.”
CNN reported that Ratcliff referred former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey to the Justice Department, which is also investigating now.
Emails about Trump and Russia's “Clinton-Plan” appear to be fake
Trump's allies, in their release last month, wrote an editor's “attachment” in Durham's report, saying the evidence proved evidence of the Clinton campaign, orchestrating Trump as Russia and pushing for the FBI to investigate.
The annex was explained by Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel, at the request of Senate Attorney General Chuck Grassley, who released the document.
Patel posted on social media that he found the attachment when revealing “burning bags/rooms filled with hidden Russian gate archives.” Grasley said in a statement that the attachment “exposed the reported Hillary Clinton campaign plan to connect President Donald Trump to Russia.”
But according to a Durham report, the emails cited by Trump allies appear to be fake.
The newly released attachment focused partly on an email allegedly from George Soros' Open Social Foundation Leonard Benardo, the FBI determined that it was unreliable at the time. Durham's “best assessment” of emails cited in the memo is that they are a combination of Russian intelligence-theft emails, meaning they are not real.
“The best evaluation of the office is that on July 25 and July 27, the claims to be from Benardo's emails ended up being a combination of several emails hacked by Russian intelligence hackers, including the Open Social Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment Foundation, etc.,” the attachment said.
“In short,” Durham’s office made partially edited sentences from the attachment, unable to “certain that the so-called Clinton campaign plan (the edited part) is completely real, partly real, composite material extracted from multiple sources, in some ways overstated, or all forged.”
An email from Bernardo allegedly discussed “HRC approval” “about Trump and Russian hackers’ ideas for the U.S. election.”
“This should disperse the emails people themselves lack,” the alleged email continued, possibly referring to the use of Clinton's use of private servers during her tenure as Secretary of State.
Another email allegedly sent from Benardo in the summer of 2016 claimed that Clinton's foreign policy adviser at the time said: “Demonizing Putin and Trump will be long-term.
Durham's report noted that a portion of the so-called Benardo emails used a verbatim line from completely different emails sent by cybersecurity experts in DC-based think tanks.
The memorandum also includes two different versions of what Benardo calls an email.
Despite confirming that the emails were composites and therefore not true, Durham criticized the FBI for coming to the same conclusion too quickly – without raising the same doubts about Trump and Russia's archives.
Durham wrote in an attachment that the FBI dismissed the information “without any investigative steps actually taken to confirm or refute the allegations, which is unreliable.”