Barr pressed Durham to find flaws in the Russia investigation. It didn’t go well.

WASHINGTON — It became a regular litany of grievances from President Donald Trump and his supporters: The investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia was a witch hunt, they maintained, that had been opened without any solid basis, went on too long and found no proof of collusion.

Egged on by Trump, Attorney General William Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John Durham and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Trump left office.

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But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep-state plot alleged by Trump and suspected by Barr.

Moreover, a monthslong review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.

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Interviews by the Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Trump and Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.

Now, as Durham works on a final report, the interviews by the Times provide new details of how he and Barr sought to recast the scrutiny of the 2016 Trump campaign’s myriad if murky links to Russia as unjustified and itself a crime.

Barr, Durham and Dannehy declined to comment. The current and former officials who discussed the investigation all spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal, political and intelligence sensitivities surrounding the topic.

A month after Barr was confirmed as attorney general in February 2019, special counsel Robert Mueller ended the Russia investigation and turned in his report without charging any Trump associates with engaging in a criminal conspiracy with Moscow over its covert operation to help Trump win the 2016 election.

Trump would repeatedly portray the Mueller report as having found “no collusion with Russia.” The reality was more complex. In fact, the report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” and it established both how Moscow had worked to help Trump win and how his campaign had expected to benefit from the foreign interference.

That spring, Barr assigned Durham to scour the origins of the Russia investigation for wrongdoing, telling Fox News that he wanted to know if “officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale” in deciding to pursue the investigation. “A lot of the answers have been inadequate, and some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together,” he added.

At the time Barr was confirmed, he told aides that he already suspected that intelligence abuses played a role in igniting the Russia investigation — and that unearthing any wrongdoing would be a priority.

In May 2019, soon after giving Durham his assignment, Barr summoned the head of the National Security Agency, Paul Nakasone, to his office. In front of several aides, Barr demanded that the NSA cooperate with the Durham inquiry.

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Referring to the CIA and British spies, Barr also said he suspected that the NSA’s “friends” had helped instigate the Russia investigation by targeting the Trump campaign, aides briefed on the meeting said.

Durham spent his first months looking for any evidence that the origin of the Russia investigation involved an intelligence operation targeting the Trump campaign.

Durham’s team spent long hours combing the CIA’s files but found no way to support the allegation.

Durham and Barr had not yet given up when a new problem arose: In early December, the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael Horowitz, completed his own report on the origins of the Russia investigation.

The inspector general revealed errors and omissions in wiretap applications targeting a former Trump campaign adviser and determined that an FBI lawyer had doctored an email in a way that kept one of those problems from coming to light.

But the broader findings contradicted Trump’s accusations and the rationale for Durham’s inquiry. Horowitz found no evidence that FBI actions were politically motivated. And he concluded that the investigation’s basis — an Australian diplomat’s tip that a Trump campaign adviser had seemed to disclose advance knowledge that Russia would release hacked Democratic emails — had been sufficient to lawfully open it.

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The week before Horowitz released the report, he and aides came to Durham’s offices to go over it. Durham lobbied Horowitz to drop his finding that the diplomat’s tip had been sufficient for the FBI to open its “full” counterintelligence investigation, arguing that it was enough at most for a “preliminary” inquiry, according to officials. But Horowitz did not change his mind.

That weekend, Barr and Durham decided to weigh in publicly to shape the narrative on their terms.

Minutes before the inspector general’s report went online, Barr issued a statement contradicting Horowitz’s major finding, declaring that the FBI opened the investigation “on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient.”

But as Durham’s inquiry proceeded, he never presented any evidence contradicting Horowitz’s factual findings about the basis on which FBI officials opened the investigation.

By summer 2020, it was clear that the hunt for evidence supporting Barr’s hunch about intelligence abuses had failed. But he waited until after the 2020 election to publicly concede that there had turned out to be no sign of “foreign government activity” and that the CIA had “stayed in its lane” after all.

On one of Barr and Durham’s trips to Europe, according to people familiar with the matter, Italian officials — while denying any role in setting off the Russia investigation — unexpectedly offered a potentially explosive tip linking Trump to certain suspected financial crimes.

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Barr and Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore. But rather than assign it to another prosecutor, Barr had Durham investigate the matter himself — giving him criminal prosecution powers for the first time — even though the possible wrongdoing by Trump did not fall squarely within Durham’s assignment to scrutinize the origins of the Russia inquiry, the people said.

Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned and whether anyone at the White House ever found out. The extraordinary fact that Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Trump had remained secret until October 2019, when a garbled echo became public. The Times reported that Durham’s administrative review of the Russia inquiry had evolved to include a criminal investigation, while saying it was not clear what the suspected crime was. Citing their own sources, many other news outlets confirmed the development.

By the spring and summer of 2020, with Trump’s reelection campaign in full swing, the Durham investigation’s “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election” began to erode Barr’s relationship with Trump, Barr wrote in his memoir.

Trump was stoking a belief among his supporters that Durham might charge former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden. That proved too much for Barr, who in May 2020 clarified that “our concern of potential criminality is focused on others.”

Even so, in August, Trump lashed out in a Fox interview, asserting that Obama and Biden, along with top FBI and intelligence officials, had been caught in “the single biggest political crime in the history of our country,” and the only thing stopping charges would be if Barr and Durham wanted to be “politically correct.”

Against that backdrop, Barr and Durham did not shut down their inquiry when the search for intelligence abuses hit a dead end. With the inspector general’s inquiry complete, they turned to a new rationale: a hunt for a basis to accuse the Clinton campaign of conspiring to defraud the government by manufacturing the suspicions that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, along with scrutinizing what the FBI and intelligence officials knew about the Clinton campaign’s actions.

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During the Russia investigation, the FBI used claims from what turned out to be a dubious source, the Steele dossier — opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign — in its botched applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign aide.

The Durham investigation did something with parallels to that incident.

In Durham’s case, the dubious sources were memos, whose credibility the intelligence community doubted, written by Russian intelligence analysts and discussing purported conversations involving American victims of Russian hacking, according to people familiar with the matter.

The memos were part of a trove provided to the CIA by a Dutch spy agency, which had infiltrated the servers of its Russian counterpart. The memos were said to make demonstrably inconsistent, inaccurate or exaggerated claims, and some U.S. analysts believed Russia may have deliberately seeded them with disinformation.

Durham wanted to use the memos, which included descriptions of Americans discussing a purported plan by Hillary Clinton to attack Trump by linking him to Russia’s hacking and releasing in 2016 of Democratic emails, to pursue the theory that the Clinton campaign conspired to frame Trump. And in doing so, Durham sought to use the memos as justification to get access to the private communications of an American citizen.

One purported hacking victim identified in the memos was Leonard Benardo, the executive vice president of the Open Society Foundations, a pro-democracy organization whose Hungarian-born founder, Soros, has been vilified by the far-right.

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In 2017, The Washington Post reported that the Russian memos included a claim that Benardo and a Democratic member of Congress, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, had discussed how Loretta Lynch, the Obama-era attorney general, had supposedly promised to keep the investigation into Clinton’s emails from going too far.

But Benardo and Wasserman Schultz said they had never even met, let alone communicated about Clinton’s emails.

Durham set out to prove that the memos described real conversations, according to people familiar with the matter. He sent a prosecutor on his team, Andrew DeFilippis, to ask Judge Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Washington, for an order allowing them to seize information about Benardo’s emails.

But Howell decided that the Russian memo was too weak a basis to intrude on Benardo’s privacy, they said. Durham then personally appeared before her and urged her to reconsider, but she again ruled against him.

Rather than dropping the idea, Durham sidestepped Howell’s ruling by invoking grand-jury power to demand documents and testimony directly from Soros’ foundation and Benardo about his emails, the people said. Rather than fighting in court, the foundation and Benardo quietly complied, according to people familiar with the matter. But for Durham, the result appears to have been another dead end.

In a statement provided to the Times by Soros’ foundation, Benardo reiterated that he never met or corresponded with Wasserman Schultz, and he said that “if such documentation exists, it’s of course made up.”

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As the focus of the Durham investigation shifted, cracks formed inside the team. Durham’s deputy, Dannehy, a longtime close colleague, increasingly argued with him in front of other prosecutors and FBI agents about legal ethics.

Now Dannehy complained to Durham about how Barr kept hinting darkly in public about the direction of their investigation. Dannehy urged Durham to ask the attorney general to adhere to Justice Department policy and not discuss the investigation publicly. But Durham proved unwilling to challenge him.

The strains grew when Durham used grand-jury powers to go after Benardo’s emails. Dannehy opposed that tactic and told colleagues that Durham had taken that step without telling her.

By summer 2020, with Election Day approaching, Barr pressed Durham to draft a potential interim report centered on the Clinton campaign and FBI gullibility or willful blindness.

On Sept. 10, 2020, Dannehy discovered that other members of the team had written a draft report that Durham had not told her about, according to people briefed on their ensuing argument.

Dannehy erupted, according to people familiar with the matter. She told Durham that no report should be issued before the investigation was complete and especially not just before an election — and denounced the draft for taking disputed information at face value. She sent colleagues a memo detailing those concerns and resigned.

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Two people close to Barr said he had pressed for the draft to evaluate what a report on preliminary findings would look like and what evidence would need to be declassified. But they insisted that he intended any release to come during the summer or after the Nov. 3 election — not soon before Election Day.

In any case, in late September 2020, about two weeks after Dannehy quit, someone leaked to a Fox Business personality that Durham would not issue any interim report, disappointing Trump supporters hoping for a pre-Election Day bombshell.

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