On Monday, Special Counsel John Durham published a long-awaited report on the inquiry into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The report was compiled over three years by Durham and was released on May 15, 2023. It concludes that the FBI should never have launched its investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.

The charges were brought as part of Durham’s investigation into misinformation that sparked the FBI investigation into the 2016 campaign of former US President Donald Trump. Simply put, federal prosecutors do not frequently suffer defeat. However, Durham was clearly defeated in the Danchenko trial, which occurred less than five months after a relatively similar acquittal in a different case brought by the special prosecutor.

Durham and his supporters, however, used the phase of the recent trials to present evidence of what they claimed was a failure on the part of FBI agents to follow up on leads as they looked into the origins of the Steele dossier, a collection of allegations brought together by a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele about connections between Trump and Russia. Steele’s primary source for the dossier was Danchenko.

Who is John Durham?

John Henry Durham is an American lawyer who served as the United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut from 2018 to 2021. He was born on March 16, 1950. Durham was the US Attorney for the District of Connecticut in 2019 when he was appointed by then-Attorney General William Barr to investigate potential misconduct by government officials involved in the original Russia investigation.

However, after more than three years, Durham’s work has failed to live up to the expectations of Trump supporters, who hoped he would uncover broad FBI conspiracies to derail the Republican’s candidacy. Notably, only three criminal cases have emerged as a result of the investigation.

The first case involved Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer who was accused of changing an email pertaining to the surveillance of Carter Page, a former member of the Trump campaign. It resulted in a guilty plea and a probationary period, and it involved FBI misconduct that the inspector general of the Justice Department had previously uncovered.

In 2016, Durham’s team met with the FBI’s top attorney to discuss information about a rumoured digital backchannel between a Russian bank and the Trump organisation. During that meeting, the Democratic attorney was accused by Durham’s team of making a false statement to the FBI’s top attorney. The FBI looked into the matter but discovered no suspicious contacts. In May, Michael Sussmann, the defendant’s attorney, was swiftly found not guilty.

Although Durham’s work has continued throughout the Justice Department under the Biden administration, it appears that the Danchenko trial is going to be the final criminal case for his team.