WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 22nd June, 2023) US Special Counsel John Durham said on Wednesday that neither the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) nor the Central intelligence Agency (CIA) or the National Security Agency (NSA) possessed any information that would be sufficient to launch a probe into the alleged collusion between former President Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 election.
"As we wrote in the report, we talked to the director of the CIA, the deputy director of the CIA, the director of NSA, and people within the FBI - and there was no such information that they have in their holdings at the time they opened Crossfire Hurricane (investigation)," Durham told a House Judiciary committee hearing.
Durham pointed out that key FBI personnel in the case did not have sufficient grounds to launch the investigation but had a clear bias during it that resulted in ignoring a host of red flags. As regards the infamous Steel dossier, Durham said that not a single assertion in it was corroborated with evidence.
In May, Durham published his over-300-page report following three years of reviewing the FBI's actions in the alleged Trump-Russia collusion probe, including the FBI spying on Trump's former campaign adviser. The report concluded that the FBI should have never launched the probe and should also have ignored "raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated" intelligence that allegedly indicated that connections existed between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
The Steele dossier for several years served as a guide for US authorities to investigate the alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
