CNN’s Jake Tapper said Monday that the newly released Durham report exonerates former President Donald Trump, adding the report is “devastating” for the FBI.
Special counsel John Durham found the FBI used “uncorroborated intelligence” when it launched its investigation into Trump ahead of the 2016 election. The report also found agents failed to maintain “strict fidelity to the law” throughout their investigation.
“The report is now here, it has dropped. And it might have not produced everything of what some Republicans hoped for, it is, regardless, devastating to the FBI, and to a degree, it does exonerate Donald Trump,” Tapper said.
CNN’s Evan Perez then added that the “FBI moved very quickly to investigate these allegations of connections of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that they did so by ignoring a lot of evidence that would have led them to drop that altogether.”
The report also found that “neither U.S. nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement” of the investigation. (RELATED: ‘Scammed’: Trump Responds To Conclusion Of Durham Probe)
“Our investigation determined that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting,” the report found.
Durham was appointed in 2020 by then Attorney General Bill Barr and was tasked with investigating Crossfire Hurricane, which was the investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign that alleged Russian collusion. That investigation later determined there was no evidence of criminal conspiracy between Trump campaign officials and operatives of the Russian government.