DURHAM REPORT RELEASED: OBAMA ADMINISTRATION HAD NO 'ACTUAL EVIDENCE' OF COLLUSION WITH RUSSIA BY TRUMP WHEN IT LAUNCHED CONTRIVED INVESTIGATION...

by Shawn Fleetwood at the Federalist

The Obama administration possessed no real evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump colluded with Russian government officials when it launched its investigation into the Trump campaign leading up to the 2016 election, according to a new bombshell report.

On Monday, Special Counsel John Durham released the findings of his years-long investigation into the origins of the FBI’s surveillance of the Trump campaign in the months before, during, and after the 2016 presidential contest. Despite the agency’s claims that the inquiry — commonly referred to as Crossfire Hurricane — was predicated on the belief that Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russian officials leading up to the election, Durham’s report found the FBI had no evidence to warrant such an investigation.

“Indeed, based on the evidence gathered in the multiple exhaustive and costly federal investigations of these matters, including the instant investigation, neither the U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” the report reads.

The baseless investigation into the Trump campaign started after Australian intelligence notified the FBI about “concerning comments” from George Papadopoulos, an unpaid foreign policy advisor for the Trump team, about the Russians purportedly having dirt on Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In his report, Durham details the recklessness with which leading FBI officials, such as then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and then-Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, launched Crossfire Hurricane and further revealed that the FBI did not possess evidence of Trump-Russia collusion as late as March 2017.

The FBI launched a full investigation “without (i) any significant review of its own intelligence databases, (ii) collection and examination of any relevant intelligence from other U.S. intelligence agencies, (iii) interviews of witnesses essential to understand the raw information it had received or (iv) using any of the standard analytical tools typically employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence,” the report reads. “In addition, FBI records prepared by Strzok in February and March 2017 show that at the time of the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI had no information in its holdings indicating that at any time during the campaign anyone in the Trump campaign had been in contact with any Russian intelligence officials.”

Durham furthermore notes how the FBI’s launching of Crossfire Hurricane —…