Attorney General Pam Bondi this past week directed federal prosecutors to launch a grand jury investigation into accusations that the Obama administration manufactured intelligence about Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Her order bears striking similarities to President Donald Trump’s first term, when then-Attorney General Bill Barr alleged that “government power was used to spy on American citizens.” Barr tapped John Durham to lead what became a four-year probe that faulted the FBI for numerous actions launching and carrying out its investigation of Trump and Russia.
But Durham’s lengthy investigation did not lead to any criminal charges — or allegations of significant wrongdoing — related to the CIA and intelligence community’s role in concluding that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and wanted to help Trump win.
In essence, Bondi is now asking her prosecutors to investigate a period in American history that has been scrutinized and re-scrutinized for more than eight years now. It’s the latest in a series of prosecutorial moves in which Trump’s Justice Department has been wielded to go after his perceived political opponents and enemies.
“John Durham was dead set on bringing criminal charges if he could. And he didn’t get anywhere near the type of charges or the type of players they’re talking about here,” said Elie Honig, a senior CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor.
“This is now the fifth bite at that same apple,” Honig said. “If they want to go down this road again, I don’t see any reason to think they’re going to do any better unless they just completely manipulate the facts here.”
Bondi’s new probe was sparked by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has declassified and released several sets of documents in recent weeks she claims were evidence of a “seditious conspiracy,” alleging that Obama officials should be prosecuted for manufacturing intelligence that Russia interfered in the election.
“I don’t know what excuse there is for those who supposedly investigated this previously, whether it was Durham or others, that they were not able to put together the dots and ultimately show the truth to the American people,” Gabbard told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo last month when asked why other investigations like Durham’s did not find evidence of the allegations she was making.
“I really cannot fathom — there is no rationale or logical explanation for why they failed,” she continued. “The only logical conclusion that I can draw in this, Maria, is what you’re implying here directly, is that there was direct intent to cover up the truth about what occurred and who was responsible, and the broad network of how this seditious conspiracy was concocted and who exactly was responsible for carrying it out.”
While Durham’s investigation focused primarily on FBI missteps that had been documented by the Justice Department inspector general, Gabbard’s allegations are now directed at the CIA and intelligence community.
Durham found that the intelligence community’s assessment of Russia’s election meddling — which detailed a social media influence campaign and cyber operations directed by President Vladimir Putin — was one of multiple investigations into Moscow’s actions in 2016 that had contributed “to our understanding of Russian election interference efforts.”
“There was a real Russian threat,” Durham testified in 2023 when asked about the January 2017 assessment from the CIA and intelligence community detailing Russia’s election interference that’s the focus of Gabbard’s renewed scrutiny.
Conflating the intelligence community’s findings on Russian interference
But at the White House podium last month, Gabbard alleged that Obama administration officials knowingly pushed a false narrative about Russia’s election interference, claiming “the evidence that we have found and that we have released directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment.”
In her allegations, Gabbard has conflated and misrepresented what the intelligence community actually concluded in its assessment.
For example, Gabbard cited various intelligence assessments from 2016 that stated the Russians did not alter the election results through cyberattacks aimed at infiltrating voting systems. But the intelligence community never found any votes were altered in the first place.
She also declassified and released a Republican House Intelligence Committee report that alleged the intelligence community’s assessment that Putin preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton was thinly sourced and ignored contradictory evidence. But unlike Gabbard, the House report did not argue that the intelligence was “manufactured” or that Russian election interference did not occur.
Democrats have accused Gabbard and Trump of using the Russia investigation documents to try to distract from the furor surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein files. Gabbard’s allegations, they argue, are rebutted by the investigations carried out by Durham, special counsel Robert Mueller, the Justice Department inspector general and the Senate Intelligence Committee, which all concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
“After years of investigation, John Durham confirmed what we already knew: There was no grand conspiracy to frame Donald Trump,” said Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “What we do know, from the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report and multiple independent investigations, is that Russia interfered in our elections in order to help Trump win.”
Durham’s investigation lasted four years
Durham’s report was highly critical of the FBI’s decision to investigate Trump and Russia, concluding that the agency did not find “any actual evidence of collusion” between the two and failed to take basic investigative steps before launching a yearslong probe. He indicted three people throughout his four-year investigation, leading to one guilty plea of a low-level FBI lawyer and two acquittals.
His report focused on the FBI’s actions much more than the CIA and the intelligence community. But there are numerous reports from 2019 and 2020 showing both Durham and Barr sought to question CIA officials about their findings on Russian election interference in 2016.
With the new grand jury investigation, it’s still not yet clear what allegations specifically Bondi wants prosecutors to probe or even who will be leading 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 might stem from DNI Gabbard’s disclosures.”
Gabbard isn’t the only Trump official who has released documents and made criminal referrals related to Russia and the 2016 election.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe also released a review of the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment last month that criticized the conclusion that Putin sought to help Trump.
Ratcliffe’s review said the conclusion on Putin was reached “through an atypical & corrupt process,” though it found “the overall assessment was deemed defensible.”
Ratcliffe referred former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey to the Justice Department, which the department is also now investigating, CNN reported.
Emails about ‘Clinton-plan’ on Trump and Russia appear to be faked
Trump’s allies have made much hay over the release last month of a redacted classified “annex” from Durham’s report they say shows evidence the Clinton campaign plotted to tie Trump to Russia and push the FBI to investigate the matter.
The annex was declassified by Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel at the request of Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, who released the document.
Patel posted on social media that he found the annex while uncovering “burn bags/room filled with hidden Russia Gate files.” Grassley said in a statement that the annex “exposes a reported Hillary Clinton campaign plan to falsely tie President Donald Trump to Russia.”
But the emails cited by Trump’s allies appear to be faked, according to Durham’s report.
The newly released annex focuses in part on emails allegedly from Leonard Benardo at George Soros’ Open Society Foundations that the FBI determined at the time were not credible. Durham’s own “best assessment” of the emails cited in the memos is that they were a composite of emails stolen by Russian intelligence, meaning they were not genuine.
“The office’s best assessment is that the July 25 and July 27 emails that purport to be from Benardo were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based think tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment and others,” the annex says.
“In short,” reads a partially redacted sentence from the annex, Durham’s office could not “determine definitely whether the purported Clinton campaign plan (redacted section) was entirely genuine, partially true, a composite pulled from multiple sources, exaggerated in certain respects, or fabricated in its entirety.”
One email, allegedly from Benardo, discussed how “HRC approved” an “idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering with the U.S. elections.”
“That should distract people from her own missing email,” the alleged email continues, likely in reference to Clinton’s use of a private server during her time as the secretary of state.
A separate email allegedly sent from Benardo in the summer of 2016 claims that a foreign policy adviser for Clinton at the time said “it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the F.B.I. will put more oil into the fire.”
Durham’s report notes that a portion of the alleged Benardo emails used verbatim lines from an entirely different email sent by a cybersecurity expert at a DC-based think tank.
The memos also include two different versions of Benardo’s alleged email.
A spokesperson for Open Society Foundations said in a statement to CNN: “The claim that the Open Society Foundations helped orchestrate an FBI investigation is an outrageous falsehood. It is grounded in malicious disinformation traced to Russian intelligence and now weaponized as part of a politically motivated campaign to attack our leadership and our work to promote human rights. The Durham report found no wrongdoing by our staff.”
Despite determining that the emails were composites and therefore not authentic, Durham criticized the FBI for too quickly coming to the same conclusion — and for not then applying the same skepticism to the dossier about Trump and Russia.
The FBI, Durham writes in the annex, dismissed the information “as not credible without any investigative steps actually having been taken to either corroborate or disprove the allegations.”
This story has been updated with additional comment.
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