The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) allowed itself to be weaponized for political purposes during the 2016 presidential election. That is the conclusion of Special Counsel John Durham‘s damning final report released Monday.
It is a sobering conclusion, one strongly supported by the facts in the 316-page report and one that should prompt lawmakers from both parties to clean house at what is supposed to be the nation’s premier bastion of law enforcement, not law bending or breaking.
According to Durham’s report, the FBI’s 2016 investigation into alleged collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia began with a single unverified account of a months-old conversation in a bar with an unpaid foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. Without even speaking to the primary source of information, and in a departure from FBI standards, a full investigation was opened despite the FBI having no information that anyone from the Trump campaign had ever been in contact with Russian intelligence officials.
What the United States intelligence community did learn in the months after the FBI began spying on the Trump campaign was that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had hatched its own plan to create a fake scandal tying candidate Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian hackers who compromised the Democratic National Committee’s computers.