Special counsel John Durham’s probe of the origins into the Russia investigation is starting to wrap up without finding a deep-state plot to implicate the campaign of former President Donald Trump, according to a story based on anonymous sources by the New York Times.
At one point, the New York Times reports, the investigation expanded to include suspicious financial dealings related to Trump. The New York Times didn’t have specifics, and, in any event, the financial probe yielded no charges against anyone.
Interviews by the Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another,” the New York Times said. At the same time, Trump and then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr “promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.”
Three lawyers working on the probe who had disputes with Durham were his “No. 2 and longtime aide” Nora R. Dannehy, as well as Anthony Scarpelli and Neeraj N. Patel.
But Durham’s investigation never found evidence contradicting the inspector general’s findings, the New York Times reports. After finding no intelligence abuses, the probe’s focus switched to look for evidence that the Clinton campaign conspired to frame Trump for Russian collusion.
Durham relied on memos written by Russian intelligence analysts supplied to the CIA by a Dutch spy agency. Some thought that the memos deliberately contained misinformation, however.