Ties between Donald Trump and Russia have not been discovered

US Special Counsel John Durham, appointed by Donald Trump in 2019, has completed an investigation into the circumstances in which the FBI became interested in the alleged ties of the former president’s entourage with Russia. In his 300-page report, published on May 15 on the website of the Department of Justice, he concluded that the US intelligence agencies had no actual evidence of “collusion” by Trump and his campaign with Moscow during the 2016 election campaign, which was marked by alleged Russian interference in the elections. The report is the result of a four-year investigation launched in May 2019.

Durham accused the bureau of pursuing an investigation based on “raw, unverified, unanalyzed and uncorroborated data”. In particular, federal investigators relied heavily on testimony and advice provided by Trump’s political opponents. Other investigative errors, according to the report, were repeated instances of “confirmation bias,” where information that undermines the prerequisites for an investigation is ignored.

The report says the FBI treated the Trump investigation differently from other politically sensitive cases, including those involving Hillary Clinton, the ex-president’s 2016 rival. Democrats that they could be the alleged targets of interference by foreign intelligence agencies, while such information was not brought to Trump. “The Department of Justice and the FBI have failed in their mission,” the report says.

In turn, on May 15, the FBI said that, as a result of the prosecutor’s report, they “carried out dozens of corrective actions.” “Had these reforms been carried out in 2016, the errors identified in the report could have been prevented. This report highlights the importance of ensuring that the FBI continues its work with the rigor, objectivity, and professionalism that the American people deserve and rightfully expect,” reads a statement posted on the agency’s website. And House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan posted a request on his Twitter page that suggests he invited Durham to testify on the report before Congress next week.

At the same time, on his social network Truth Social, Trump noted that the American public was deceived from the very beginning: “After a lengthy investigation, Special Counsel John Durham concludes that the FBI should never have started an investigation of Trump and Russia!”

Earlier, an FBI investigation into alleged Russian interference in the presidential election resulted in dozens of criminal charges against members of the Trump campaign and his associates. Trump called the case a “witch hunt.” In March 2019, previous Special Counsel Robert Mueller reported in a report that there were “numerous ties” between the Russian government and the ex-president’s campaign and that the Russians allegedly worked for Trump, but did not provide any evidence of criminal collusion between the Republican campaign and Moscow. .

Subsequently, in May 2019, Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham as Special Counsel to look for potential government misconduct in a previous investigation. During the proceedings in 2020, he opened three criminal cases for giving false testimony. Subsequently, two suspects in this case – Hillary Clinton’s lawyer Michael Sussmann and Russian-American political analyst Igor Danchenko – were acquitted by a jury. The third defendant in the case, former FBI lawyer Kevin Klinesminth, pleaded guilty in 2020 to forging an email linked to a former Trump aide.

According to Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov, “this is not the first time that the Americans have charged very complex and large-scale investigations, and then the investigations come to the conclusion that there is no interference from Russia.” According to him, the investigation once again confirmed “the absurdity of the accusations against our country that were made at various levels of all branches of the US government.”

The situation around the investigation of Trump’s ties with Russia indicates that the Democrats were ready to take extreme, bordering on legal measures, just to create problems for Trump, said Lev Sokolshchik, a researcher at the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. “Such a sharp and uncompromising struggle speaks of the extreme polarization of the US political system,” the expert noted.

According to Sokolshchik, due to the inter-party conflict, the US authorities are no longer able to solve the problems they face, instead making them hostages of the confrontation between Republicans and Democrats. The obvious effect of such a struggle for power is the dysfunction of the entire political system, which cannot perform its main functions, such as achieving strategic stability or solving problems with public debt, Sokolshchik concluded.