The report often sounds more like an inspector general inquiry in search of waste, fraud and abuse that may not rise to the level of criminality. Yet the report concludes with a 17-page discussion of how politically sensitive investigations should or could be handled differently in the future, including by assigning a career official to challenge FBI surveillance applications in such cases and not leaving important information in footnotes. “The answer is not the creation of new rules, but a renewed fidelity to the old,” Durham writes. Durham gone wildĭurham’s report concludes with something unusual for a criminal probe conducted under the Justice Department’s special counsel regulations: a variety of recommendations about how DOJ and the FBI should change the way they do business.Įarly on, Durham says he’s not proposing “any wholesale changes” in FBI or DOJ policies. It’s particularly hard to secure convictions in politically sensitive cases, the veteran federal prosecutor wrote. That last line appears to reference the scores of allegations Republicans have leveled at Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and its outside allies.ĭurham also seemed to dismiss the idea that the quick acquittals by juries of two of the three defendants his office prosecuted suggested his team’s efforts were misguided. He added that the law doesn’t prohibit “all unseemly or unethical conduct that political campaigns might undertake for tactical advantage” and that prosecutors must prove criminal intent to secure convictions. The law “does not always make a person’s bad judgment, even horribly bad judgment, standing alone, a crime,” Durham wrote. Clinesmith was not sentenced to any prison time. In a third case, an ex-FBI lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty to altering an email that was used to support a surveillance application. “ot every injustice or transgression amounts to a criminal offense,” he wrote.ĭurham brought criminal charges against just three people.

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